Pain is all I feel lately. My portfolio haemorrhaging away faster than I can beg my landlord for "one more month". Besides all my pain and sorrow, there's DeFi, and it seems to have taken the backseat to GameFi and other "Fis".

GameFi for one has been super pre-dominant. For instance, Sweat economy (which I will be doing a full review on later, follow for more), which raised MILLIONS of dollars while we all collectively LOST millions of dollars, is a really interesting one, because it's literally a walking ponzi. (pun intended😎)

I downloaded the Sweat economy app on iOS, and figured out that without a key, it's basically just an ad for their actual web2 app. So, because I wanted to get research in for this article, I downloaded the other app (Sweatcoin), but never got to opening it as I was too busy working for my wages.

But, the fact that I had ignored the app for so long, only to just download it out of the blue a few weeks later is a tell-tale sign of "herd mentality", and THAT is why DeFi has gone under lately.

People are always looking for the next best thing, myself included. So when our 5,000,000% APYs come crashing down to more respectable figures like 12% (which is still AMAZING for any asset right now btw),we go off on the hunt looking for things to fill the void we just created for ourselves.

DeFi is my favourite Fi out of all the popular Fis, because it was what got me into development (and making an extra 5 figure income by the side devving for mid-cap projects), but the complexities of it made it so that not just anyone could hop in and make apps.

There were complex apps like DeFiSaver that were all the rave, and Yearn finance and Messi and Time Wonderland and Fantom and oh God I just remembered Time. (I lost a crap ton of money on TIME and Solidly too. Horrible memories)

PTSD aside, let's take a deep, data-driven dive into the DeFi space.

First off, we can see that the entire DeFi sector is worth just about 45.6B USD, with the top three platforms taking way over 10% of that (Decentralized finance lol. Sure).LIDO is the one that scares me the most, but we'll talk about how centralized ETH is in a coming article.

Ignoring the sea of red, the DeFi market cap has plummeted about 20% or more from the last time I checked. That might not seem like a lot, but when you realize that we're talking about BILLIONS here being wiped out, you'll surely feel something!

DeFiPulse's TVL ranking also tells a similar story. Roughly half of the total DeFi market cap is locked value (which means we all got caught with our pants down), with Maker having a whopping 27% control of the ENTIRE DeFi market. 

Where am I going with all this? DeFi isn't what it used to be. It's gone from fun Pancakeswap forks and complex yield-bearing protocols to a stable, asset-class-like "pseudo-index" controlled by top VCs and bloody MakerDAO. It's a real and true shitshow now.

I have all but pulled out of Ethereum DeFi, but surely it can't be so bad on other chains?

WRONG! Other chains have it worse even because only a handful of native projects control pretty much the entire market. 

The whole point of this article was to "reflect" on how far we've come in DeFi, and where we're going next. And if Ethereum doesn't pump soon, I can only imagine what will happen to DeFi.

Thanks for reading! Drop a 👍 if you liked the article, comment if you loved it and a 👎 if you just couldn't stand it. I'm answering ALL comments, so let me have your unfiltered thoughts! Cheers!