DeFi Trading Surges as Centralized Exchanges Feel Regulators’ Wrath

What are crypto users doing now that the US has gone after two of the largest cryptocurrency platforms? Turning to decentralized finance, or DeFi, apparently.

Back-to-back days of lawsuits from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against the two largest cryptocurrency exchanges caused many to decry that there is a “war on crypto.” It’s a pattern the market has seen before, when DeFi volumes soared days after centralized crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022.

There are sectors of the market, however, that indicate the contrary.

According to DefiLlama, decentralized exchanges (DEX) have been exploding in volume today—likely because of the fact that Coinbase and Binance are currently under regulatory fire.

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The largest increase in daily volume comes from Uniswap. The popular Ethereum-based DEX has clocked an impressive 41% rise in transactions on the day, bringing the platform’s 24-hour volume to $56.37 million. The week has also been green for Uniswap, with a 38% uptick, according to DefiLlama.

A bit further down the list, but also notching double-digit gains for daily transaction volumes is, surprisingly, PancakeSwap. Despite a red month, with a near 20% drop in daily volume since May, today it has significantly erased those numbers, coming in at a green 17% increase over the past twenty four hours.

PancakeSwap’s surge in daily volumes is interesting it’s part of the Binance ecosystem, which finds itself in the throes of the U.S. government. But the protocol lives on the Binance Smart Chain, the DeFi arm of Changpeng Zhao’s (CZ) empire. Some food for thought, as to how far traders so the US government’s reach into DeFi.

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Going beyond decentralized exchanges, volumes among several of the main DeFi platforms have been largely unchanged.

Decentralized lending protocols, such as Aave, Curve Finance and Compound, have seen slight increases between 0.3% to 2.1% on in the past day, according to DefiLlama.

Despite the purportedly devastating blows to the cryptocurrency industry after Monday and Tuesday regulatory actions, it seems only natural that traders and investors alike will flee to DeFi protocols.

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