DeFi Reshapes the CoinDesk 20

Decentralized finance (DeFi) and the assets related to it have surged not just in price but in market activity, including listings and volume on some of the more liquid and established centralized exchanges. Volume on some of the largest decentralized exchanges has grown at a time when the activity of these exchanges' and lending services' native tokens has surged on their more centralized counterparts.

This has put them into the catchment of the CoinDesk 20, which ranks the most heavily traded assets in crypto, as measured by dollar volume on trusted exchanges. The top DeFi assets by volume are re-shaping the list from the bottom up.

The latest quarterly update to the list, which went live on  Monday, April 26, based on Q1 and Q4 volume data, incorporates seven new assets: aave, filecoin, the graph, nucypher, polkadot, uniswap and YFI (yearn.finance) into the list of the market's 20 volume leaders. Six of the seven are DeFi applications or related services.

Aave, the graph, nucypher, uniswap and yearn.finance are all ERC-20 tokens, running on the Ethereum blockchain. Filecoin and Polkadot run their tokens and their services on their own respective blockchains.

Many of these assets, especially those in the DeFi category, are relatively new additions to the component exchanges used to rank the CoinDesk 20 list. Nonetheless, their volume has grown quickly. Some are entering the list late, excluded previously due to an error in calculations. (See below.)

The seven new assets replace Cardano's ATOM, dai, ethereum classic, kyber network, omg network, orchid and 0x.

The CoinDesk 20 is a list of core digital assets that constitute roughly 99% of the market by volume, not an index. Its methodology uses volume data from eight exchanges, compiled by Nomics. The eight exchanges were selected, vetted and verified by all three of a trio of studies on fake and verifiable volume, published in 2019 and 2020. They are: Bitfinex, bitFlyer, Bitstamp, Coinbase, Gemini, itBit, Kraken and Poloniex. Information on CoinDesk Indexes can be found here.

Note: Polkadot, uniswap and yearn.finance should have been included in the 2021 Q1 update to the CoinDesk 20, but were left out due to an error in last quarter's calculation.