The DeFi market is stabilizing at $160.56 billion in TVL, but data shows a liquidity split between spot and derivatives, while collateral remains clustered in just a few major venues. Meanwhile, spot, perpetuals, and stablecoin bases are expanding in parallel, suggesting that order flow and collateral are recycled across fewer but more efficient protocols.
On a 24-hour basis, the market is nearly balanced with $19.43 billion in spot flow and $18.83 billion in derivatives. This near-parity shows that traders are engaging with DeFi at multiple layers: speculative leverage through perps and settlement-driven flows through spot DEXs.
It also suggests that funding rates are more closely tied to stablecoin issuance than to new external inflows, which may keep markets sensitive to stablecoin policy changes.
(Source: DeFi Llama, Sept. 16, 2025)
(Source: DeFi Llama, Sept. 16, 2025)
A concentration like this increases the systemic interlinkages: most of the collateral is either Ethereum or liquid staking tokens that depend on ETH security. This means liquidity shocks in ETH markets will propagate across multiple DeFi layers simultaneously.
It also shows how limited the innovation funnel has become: capital continues to cycle into staking and lending primitives rather than novel use cases, making growth more a result of scale than diversification.
The outcome is a DeFi market in which smaller but faster-moving protocols can temporarily capture very large flows but must maintain constant innovation or incentives to keep that share.
(Source: DeFi Llama, Sept. 16, 2025)
Perpetual markets remain nearly as large as spot activity. With $124.66 billion in seven-day volume, perps added more than $20 billion compared to the week before. The weekly total was still about $10 billion higher than spot volumes. A close 24-hour split between spot and perps shows that risk is evenly shared between taker execution and derivatives positioning.
These ratios dwarf those of lending markets such as Aave, which earned just $13.2 million on $41.8 billion of TVL, a fee intensity of only 0.03%. This extreme divergence shows how derivatives venues effectively “print” revenue out of volatility, while lending and staking remain utility layers with little direct fee capture. If these economics persist, token valuations for trading protocols will stay elevated relative to collateral-heavy protocols.
With nearly $290 billion in circulation, stablecoins provide the ballast for both sides of the market. USDT alone at over $170 billion serves as the dominant settlement layer for centralized and decentralized venues.
The data shows us that the DeFi market is shaped by three distinct forces: the concentration of collateral in lending and staking, the redistribution of spot volume towards DEXs on Solana and Base, and the fee-intensive activity of derivatives and stablecoin issuers.
Spot and perps are balanced in dollar terms, but the economic gravity has moved to a small group of protocols that capture the overwhelming majority of capital and revenue. Liquidity is abundant but highly clustered; execution quality depends on the choice of the trading venue, while systemic dependence on stablecoin issuers and leverage is higher than ever.
We now have a market where participation looks broad on the surface, with hundreds of protocols and dozens of large chains. However, effective control of both users and capital rests with fewer than 20 names. This creates efficiency but increases systemic risk.
The balance between innovation, incentives, and capital safety will decide whether DeFi continues to grow and become more resilient or remains hostage to the same few players that dominate it today.
