Strong performance by DeFI products Venus and PancakeSwap
January has been a marvelous month for Binance Smart Chain, as the relatively new blockchain solution hit a record of 15 billion dollars in transaction volume. The biggest contributors were two DeFi products: Venus and PancakeSwap. Binance Smart Chain is clearly positioning itself as a contender in the DeFi space, as stated in the Dapp Industry Report for January 2021.
At the moment of writing the total volume on Binance Smart Chain increased even further. In the past 30 days, there have been 19.5 billion dollars in volume. The lion’s share comes from Venus, which contributed 17.92 billion dollars, followed by PancakeSwap.
BSC DeFi vs Ethereum
The market for DeFi products is traditionally dominated by the Ethereum blockchain But Binance Smart Chain is slowly becoming a serious contender in the DeFi charts.
Compound and dYdX are the biggest DeFi products on the market, with $24.18 billion and $21.89 billion in volume respectively. Venus is just behind in third place, according to the DappRadar DeFi Rankings.
Even though Ethereum dapps strongly dominate the DeFi rankings, both Venus and PancakeSwap make it into the top 10.
What are Venus and PancakeSwap?
Venus is an algorithmic-based money market system that enables users to use their cryptocurrencies as collateral. From this collateral, a stablecoin called VAI can be created. In January we already noted that Venus was the fastest-growing dapp on Binance Smart Chain. The project is based on the success of Compound and MakerDAO on the Ethereum blockchain.
At the same time, PancakeSwap allows users to easily swap one token for the other without the need for a centralized exchange. This DeFi service is very similar to market leader Uniswap on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing users to trade, exchange and provide liquidity.