Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a rapidly growing subsector of the cryptocurrency ecosystem that is reshaping the face of the global financial infrastructure and offering people from all walks of life access to banking and financial services.
The smart contract capabilities of the Ethereum network and the platform’s first-mover advantage resulted in a majority of the current DeFi ecosystem being hosted on Ethereum, but high transaction costs and network congestion have become a barrier to entry for the vast majority of users.
One network that has risen in popularity and prominence for offering consistently low transaction costs and rapid processing times is Fantom, whose directed acyclic graph architecture offers infinite scalability that increases as the number of new users and nodes come online.
On top of a rapidly expanding nonfungible token community, the Fantom network can now add a multi-billion-dollar DeFi protocol to its list of accomplishments thanks to the successful launch and liquidity build of Geist, a decentralized non-custodial liquidity market protocol where users can lend or borrow crypto assets on the Fantom protocol.
Since the launch of the Geist protocol on October 5, the platform has rapidly ascended in the total value locked (TVL) ranking and has accumulated more than $11.1 billion worth of locked value as of October 8, according to the Geist Dashboard. The rapid rise in TVL on Geist confirms an active and involved community and solid backing from well-funded sources.
Assets locked on Geist include $2.44 billion worth of Tether (USDT, $604 million in Fantom (FTM), $1.3 billion in DAI, $2.32 billion in USD Coin (USDC), $2.81 billion worth of Ethereum (ETH), and $1.62 billion worth of Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC).
According to data from DeFi Llama, a TVL of $11.1 billion makes Geist the sixth-largest protocol by TVL of all DeFi platforms, placing it in the league as some of the largest and most well-established protocols on the Ethereum network such as MakerDAO and Compound.
The design of Geist was inspired by the Ethereum-based protocol AAVE, which has grown to become one of the most respected and secure protocols in the space. The developers behind the Geist wanted to take a different approach, however, which involves no governance capabilities or venture capital investments but instead features a revenue-earning token that entitles all token holders to a share of the fees generated by the platform.
Fifty percent of the revenue generated through borrowing on the protocol will be directly distributed to GEIST stakers while both lenders and borrowers receive GEIST rewards to incentivize the use of the protocol. Users also have the option to lock GEIST for three months for higher rewards.
With the launch and ascent of Geist, the Fantom network has once again proven that it is a serious contender in the layer-one field that is capable of offering a low-cost, high-throughput foundation for the most popular protocols and sectors of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.