Solana and Cosmos are gaining traction in the world of decentralised finance, although they have a long way to go to catch Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Polygon, according to a leading crypto research firm.

Messari’s second-quarter update says that Solana’s defi ecosystem has grown to just under US$1 billion in total value locked (TVL), up fourfold from the start of the quarter.

That’s still just a fraction of the US$110 billion total defi ecosystem as of July 5, but there’s an extensive pipeline of new Solana projects coming, Messari said.

“If Solana can continue to grow its developer base and application pipeline, its uniqueness may become a strength,” Messari analysts Roberto Talamas and Wilson Withiam wrote.

Ethereum had the lion’s share in TVL, controlling US$85 billion of TVL. But that 77 per cent dominance is down 20 per cent compared to five months earlier.

Forty-seven per cent of Ethereum’s TVL came from Curve, Aave, MarkerDAO, Compound, Yearn, Uniswap, and SushiSwap, with 53 per cent distributed among another 169 projects, Messari wrote.

Binance Smart Chain had US$15 billion in TVL, with two-thirds in decentralised exchange PancakeSwap and lending protocol Venus.

Polygon, the layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, grew from under US$50 million to over US$5 billion in TVL, as defi blue chips Aave, SushiSwap and Curve deployed on the network. Together they accounting for nearly 65 per cent of all value locked in Polygon at the end of the quarter.

Messari said that Cosmos’s multichain ecosystem is “gradually coming to life,” with Terra users locking in US$2.2 billion in its two assets, Mirror Protocol and Anchor Protocol, and Australian project THORChain reading nearly US$140 million in liquidity in its first three months.

But most of these chains are operating independently of each other so far and haven’t implemented the network’s Inter-Blockchain Communications protocol, Messari said.

They’ll likely do so this year, “but the question remains if the Cosmos Hub will be able to capture any of their asset flows by facilitating cross-chain transactions”.

In closing, the researchers wrote that a year ago “the concept of a multi-chain world was simply an abstract idea,” with Ethereum the sole destination for defi.

“In the span of only six months, that truth has drastically changed,” with a significant number of blockchains gaining significant traction.

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