Maker and Compound loses ground to new DeFi protocols

With over $32 billion of total value now locked into DeFi protocols, it is a well-established fact that 2020 has been the year of DeFi and this trajectory is only expected to continue into 2021.

Maker accounts for 18% of this TVL and still remains the most actively developed DeFi protocol. However, those numbers are decreasing, according to a report by Outlier Ventures.

Looking at projects showing a decrease of over 33% in commits or monthly active developers, Maker has declined by over a third on both metrics. According to Outlier Ventures, “this data suggests the old guard is losing developers to a new generation of protocols.”

That being said, protocols like Maker and Compound are still currently at 2-4x multiples of monthly developers, compared to other DeFi projects that have already seen their developer count drop significantly.

Among these projects showing a significant decline in code commits was Alpha Homora, a newly launched DeFi lending protocol that has close to $1 billion in TVL. This is despite the fact that the platform recently launched a Version 2 update, integrating with Curve, Balancer, SushiSwap, and Uniswap for leveraged yield farming.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, were the DeFi protocols Aave and Bancor. While Bancor’s code commits increased by 264% over the course of 2020, Aave reported an even more significant rise with its code commits increasing by 763% in 2020. Aave’s native token too has surged by over 34% in the past 24 hours, trading at an all-time high of $406 at the time of writing.

While developer activity is only one part of the story, it can be an important signal to predict the future outlook for a cryptocurrency.