These are exciting times, Ethereum passed the 1,000 USD price barrier over the weekend. There is a lot of activity in the market, and Defi exchanges have been doing a lot of business.

That has meant that the Ethereum mainnet, which handles most Defi transactions has been used heavily.

And as transactions begin to pile up on the net, the gas fees requested to carry out those transactions inch up higher and higher.

Average transaction fees went over the $10 level. This meant that Defi protocols running on the ETH mainnet had to paid a very hefty fee to get any transaction executed.

With these high fees the profitability of most small trades all but disappears.

That is a revolving issue facing defi exchange protocols such as Uniswap and Sushiswap.

But even though both protocols have had to face these difficulties in the past week, both are currently experiencing growth in terms of the Total Value Locked (TVL) in their liquidity pools.

In the case of Uniswap the TVL stands at USD 2.76B, an important step up from the USD 2.15B on January 1st. The case of Sushiswap is a bit more impressive, as that Dex has reached an All-Time High of USD 1.61B in that metric, up some USD 410 million from 1.19B on January 1st. It must be noted that part of the increase is due to the overall improvement in valuations of the assets in those liquidity pools.

Another interesting metric that merits evaluating is the transaction volume.  In that respect Uniswap closed 2020 with a 7-day total of USD 3.6B, and is currently sitting at USD 2.25B from January 3rd to today. Sushiswap, on the other hand, closed 2020 doing USD 1.19B, and so far this week has done business for USD 1.31B surpassing last week totals in just three days.

A point to remember is that this growth in transaction volumes of these two Ethereum-based decentralized exchanges came even though the transaction fees of the network were at very high levels. It is clear then that with lower network fees the increase in trading volumes would have been even more impressive.