DeFi Coins

Decentralised finance is an attempt to build the basic financial services — a loan, a swap, interest — as code running on a blockchain instead of a licensed institution. The coins in this category are usually governance tokens: they confer a vote on changes to the protocol, and sometimes a share of its revenue.

That is a point many investors miss. A governance token is not equity in a company and confers no ownership of the protocol assets. The link between a protocol succeeding and its token appreciating depends entirely on a mechanism defined in code, and it differs from protocol to protocol.

The distinctive risk here is technical rather than only economic. A DeFi protocol is code holding money, and a bug in that code is a completely different problem from a falling price. Large sums have been lost this way, including in established and audited protocols.

DeFi Coins — the list

The 8 coins listed here moved 0.24% on average today. Aave led at 1.87% and Curve DAO lagged at -1.34%. Combined market capitalisation for the group is about $24.9B.

What the data shows about this group

The group is concentrated: Chainlink alone accounts for 42.65% of the combined market capitalisation of the 8 coins listed. That means an index of the whole category would move mostly on one coin, and that spreading across several names here diversifies less than it appears.

Measured against their all-time highs, the 8 coins here sit an average of 84.66% below. Closest to its high is Chainlink at 73.11%, furthest is Curve DAO at 97.75%. A coin down 97.75% needs a 4,344.82% gain merely to return to that high — arithmetic worth doing before assuming a deep decline is automatically an opportunity.

All 8 coins listed have a hard supply cap. That gives the group a shared economic property: rising demand is not met with new supply — though it guarantees nothing about the demand itself.

Other crypto themes

This is not financial advice.

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Last updated: 2026-09-27