The dominance of decentralized finance — or DeFi's market capitalization as a percentage of the global cryptocurrency market cap — has reached new lows not seen since last July.
The Block's DeFi Dominance data dashboard illustrates a wider trend by summing the market capitalizations of DeFi tokens for Uniswap, Aave, PancakeSwap, Maker, The Graph, Thorchain, SushiSwap, Compound, Yearn.finance, Synthetix, Bancor, 0x, UMA, Curve, Nexus Mutual, 1inch, Balancer, Serum, Alchemix and Perpetual Protocol.
The metric now has a dominance of 4.1% after dropping as low as 4.05%. DeFi's dominance was at its lowest on July 12, 2022, when its cryptocurrency market share was around 4.02%.
DeFi's recent declines in dominance coincide with bitcoin's increased market share gains this year. The first and foremost cryptocurrency has increased its dominance from 37.93% to 44.41% in the last 90 days.
Concerns about a purported Western banking crisis have fueled speculation among some that crypto's gold standard, like physical gold, is a potential safe-haven asset.
"There is nothing like a banking crisis in the United States... to remind you that our systems are fragile," Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz said during his company's recent fourth-quarter earnings call, adding, "We have been on a debt orgy for years, literally gorging ourselves with cheap money."
"In many ways, cryptocurrency was created for this point," Novogratz said.
XRP has even outperformed bitcoin, indicating how investors feel about a pending lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission against associated payments firm Ripple.
"Google Trends data confirms that users searching for 'XRP' are highly interested in the case's outcome," said Strahinja Savic, head of data and analytics at FRNT Financial. However, there is a lot of emphasis on cryptocurrency regulation. As a result, the SEC's case against Ripple may be gaining more attention, adding to [Ripple CEO Brad] Garlingouse's and figures close to the case's optimism."