The Top 3 Blockchain Projects Driving the DeFi Revolution in 2024

Top 3 DeFi Projects Revolutionizing Blockchain for 2025

Since its inception back in 2020, decentralized finance has arguably become the biggest innovation in the crypto world. It’s an alternative financial industry that provides decentralized and unrestricted access to a range of financial services, including saving, borrowing, lending and trading, without the need for banks or brokers. Transactions are performed in an open and peer-to-peer way, ensuring full transparency into everything that happens. 

The concept of DeFi has found a lot of appeal, and the total value locked in the industry currently stands at $82.22 billion as of October 2024. Its growth is driven by a constant stream of innovation, with hundreds of different projects working on new ways to improve the capabilities, accessibility and liquidity in DeFi. 

Let’s take a look at some of three of the most exciting projects that are stepping up to power the DeFi revolution as we head towards 2025. 

Solana

Solana has built up one of the most vibrant DeFi ecosystems outside of the Ethereum network, and in April 2023 it announced a game-changing new capability called “state compression”, an experimental feature that aims to dramatically cut costs for dApps on the Solana chain. 

State compression introduces a new data structure based on Merkle trees. It enables smart contracts to store hashed data on-chain, updating their end state directly onto the Solana network. By storing only hashes, it significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be stored, cutting down on storage costs while reducing execution fees, yet maintaining the same security provided by Solana’s base layer. 

The impact on Solana’s DeFi and NFT ecosystem was immediately noticeable, significantly reducing costs for DeFi dApps and NFT creators while enabling them to scale faster and further. In particular, state compression has paved the way for NFTs to be minted on Solana at much lower costs. 

The most recent data from Solana shows that the cost of minting one million NFTs on its blockchain using state compression comes to $247.80, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than the estimated cost of $6 million to mint the same number of NFTs on Ethereum. 

EOS

EOS was expecting big things to happen when it launched its EOS EVM integration in April 2023, and it has had a dramatic impact on the DeFi landscape this year, with a growing number of EVM-compatible dApps and protocol building on the EOS blockchain. By building on EOS, they can take advantage of the network’s higher performance, reliability and lower fees, while being able to access the vast liquidity of the industry’s biggest DeFi blockchain, Ethereum. 

EOS EVM paved the way for a trustless bridge that enables dApps built on EOS to interact with EVM dApps and vice versa. It enables liquidity to flow between the two chains in a seamless way with no obstacles, eliminating the need to use risky, third-party bridges. As a result, the combined liquidity of EOS and Ethereum is accelerating the growth of various EOS dApps. 

EOS EVM has had a significant impact on the dynamics of the network’s novel tokenized RAM resource. In 2023, EOS EVM generated more than 308,025 EOS in transaction fees, with a significant portion being used to purchase approximately 1.8GB of RAM, boosting the EVM’s memory storage capacity to enhance the performance of DeFi dApps. 

A second major innovation enabled is the Yield+ Liquidity initiative for DeFi dApps, launched earlier this year with the EOS EVM v0.5. The initiative introduced a liquidity rewards program that’s meant to attract DeFi dApps and grow the EOS network’s TVL. It incentivizes DeFi dApps with tokens based on the total value of deposits they’re able to attract and retain within the EOS ecosystem, fostering growth and engagement within the ecosystem. 

In the few short months since it went live, it has proven to be hugely successful, with regular updates on its impact being shared within the EOS community.

Arbitrum

Another project that’s supercharging DeFi is Arbitrum, one of the most popular Layer-2 scaling solutions on Ethereum. Its purpose is to help Ethereum-based dApps process more transactions and do it faster, and it does this by performing them off-chain, before batching them together to be settled on the Ethereum base layer. In this way, it dramatically reduces the cost of transactions while enabling instantaneous settlement, without compromising on security. 

Arbitrum’s architecture includes a unique challenge protocol for dispute resolution, plus a sequencer component that enables transactions to be confirmed instantly, making it ideal for the complex, multistep transactions that have become common in DeFi. 

With Arbitrum, it becomes economically viable to process microtransactions, opening the door to much smaller trades and investments. It also enables high-frequency trades for arbitrage traders, enabling them to take advantage of the volatile nature of digital assets, where prices can drop or climb significantly in a matter of seconds. 

In a recent update, Arbitrum revealed it had processed over one billion lifetime transactions, with around a fifth of that activity linked to DeFi. In addition, the project has become the most active L2 in Ethereum’s ecosystem, with a cumulative total of $9.26 billion in value bridged across its network just three years after it launched.