DeFi Tokens Overtake Ethereum's Rise as Network Hard Fork Looms

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Ethereum (ETH) reached a local high at $2,756 in the early hours on Thursday before slipping down to $2,610 by press time. This still represents a gain of 4.9% over the past 24 hours, and 14.8% in the last seven days.

The last time ETH was trading at these levels was on June 7, according to CoinGecko. Since then its price fell below $1,800 on several occasions; however, for the past two weeks the asset has been rising as the overall crypto market rebounded from the slide that started in mid-May.

By contrast, Bitcoin (BTC) is up .9% in the last day, struggling to break above the $40,000 level last seen on August 1.

The Ethereum network is bracing itself for a planned hard fork dubbed London—the upgrade is set to happen today at block 12,965,000.

It will introduce five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), including the much-anticipated EIP-1559, which slow down the cryptocurrency’s supply growth and lower overall transaction costs.

DeFi tokens join Ethereum

Among the last day’s other notable gainers are major tokens from the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector. AAVE, the native token of the lending Aave protocol with $13.85 billion in total value locked (TVL), mounted a rise of 15.3% to reach $360.

COMP, the governance token for the Compound Protocol, has also climbed the charts, soaring by 8.6% in the past 24 hours.

Uniswap’s native token, UNI, is up 7.5% over the last day. Recently, the largest decentralized exchange by trading volume—processing over $1.5 billion in the past 24 hours—faced criticism after removing a number of assets from its platform, including the so-called “stock tokens.”

Notably, all three of these projects are built on Ethereum. And with fees in DeFi being some of the most costly, the latest spike could be a result of expectations around the upcoming upgrade.