Author: Frank, PANews
The winter of US regulation seems to be quietly receding, with a ray of "innovation exemption" shining into the DeFi field. On June 9th, the positive signals released by SEC senior executives foreshadow that DeFi platforms may usher in a more friendly development environment.
However, under this policy tailwind, the DeFi market presents an intriguing landscape: on one hand, top protocols represented by Aave have repeatedly hit new highs in TVL with strong fundamentals; on the other hand, many top DeFi protocols' TVL growth is sluggish, and token prices have not yet recovered to early-year levels, suggesting that the market's "value discovery" path remains long. Although DeFi tokens have seen a rapid rebound in the past two days, is this driven by short-term market sentiment or deeper value logic? PANews focuses on the latest developments and data performance of DeFi top players, analyzing the opportunities and challenges within.
SEC Releases Positive Signals: DeFi Regulation Welcomes "Innovation Exemption" Framework
(The rest of the translation follows the same approach, maintaining the specified translations for specific terms and translating all other text to English.)
EigenLayer: EigenLayer pioneered the new concept of "reStaking", and since its launch, its TVL has experienced explosive growth to $12.4 billion, becoming the third-ranked DeFi protocol. Although the reStaking concept was hot in 2024 and then cooled down, with EigenLayer's TVL initially declining, from April onwards, its TVL has clearly entered a new growth cycle, growing from $7 billion to $12.4 billion in less than two months, a 77% increase. Stripped of its conceptual packaging, the real value of reStaking might be being redefined by the market.
Lido: As the leading liquid Staking project, Lido once dominated the market with stETH, with its TVL reaching nearly $40 billion in 2024. However, since the second half of 2024, with the rapid growth of Ethereum L2, Lido, which is overly concentrated on the Ethereum mainnet (over 99%), has shown a downward trend, and its TVL has been sliding. Its token's recent rebound was not significant, with a maximum increase of 61% from the low point to June 10th, far below the average of the top 20 DeFi tokens. Currently, Lido's TVL remains second only to Aave, and its scale effect is still present. The primary task to maintain its leading position might be how to quickly transform and adapt to more markets.
The SEC's regulatory shift undoubtedly injected a strong stimulus into the US DeFi market. The long-standing regulatory uncertainty that has troubled projects is expected to ease, and pending innovations like the Uniswap fee switch might finally be implemented. The trend revealed by the data is equally thought-provoking: although Ethereum remains the main carrier of TVL, DeFi's development momentum is increasingly showing its independence, even beginning to feed back value to the underlying public chains, as Bitwise analyst Danny Nelson said, "The DeFi ecosystem is becoming the engine of ETH's rise". In the future, regulatory clarity will attract more traditional financial capital to enter the DeFi field with lower risk appetite, bringing valuable new blood; meanwhile, attempts by giants like BlackRock to launch unique DeFi products not only herald a broader integration prospect but also mean that the competition for incremental markets will be more intense. This "ultimate battle" opened by regulatory relaxation might be the new starting point for DeFi's maturity and deep integration with traditional finance.
