Coinbase has added yet another digital asset to its earn program, and this time it’s another DeFi token.
The San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange announced that now its customers can earn $6 in KNC by watching lessons and completing quizzes about Kyber Network protocol that aims to make swapping cryptocurrencies and digital assets simple and efficient.
KNC is the 43rd largest cryptocurrency by market cap, which is trading at $1.43, up about 700% YTD.
Already Coinbase customers can earn $9 in COMP, a governance token of DeFi project Compound Finance, which was listed on the exchange within days of its release. Coinbase Venture is also an investor in this project.
Other crypto assets in this list include $46 in Orchid (OXT), $50 in EOS, $50 in Stellar (XLM), and Tezos (XTZ), DAI, 0x (ZRX), Zcash (ZEC), and Basic Attention token (BAT).
This ability to earn digital assets is an “increasingly important function in the crypto ecosystem” alongside buying, mining, voting, and staking, says Coinbase.
The growing DeFi space
Coinbase is particularly taking special interest in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space, which is a fast-growing one and has about $3.6 billion total value locked. Its market cap has reached almost $7.7 billion, as per CoinGecko.
DeFi tokens have been flying like crazy up until bitcoin started moving last week, and now they are retracing their greens.
But the market is focusing too much on the price instead of earnings that gives many of these tokens intrinsic value, said Max Bronstein, who handles institutional coverage at Coinbase.
“Annualized DeFi earnings are up nearly 150% on the year, standing at $42 million today,” noted Bronstein. “Wk/wk change had its second-highest ever print, with two consecutive weeks of 50% wk/wk on growth in July. Both of these weeks were 3> sigma moves,” he added.
Decentralized exchanges (DEX) and protocols offering liquidity mining are the largest growth sectors in DeFi space. While Uniswap saw its annualized earnings growing by about 10x over the last month, during the same period, Synthetix’s increased by 5x. Meanwhile, Compound and Balancer ballooned.
In its latest report, Coinbase covered the massive growth this sector is seeing and likened activity in DeFi’s with Bitcoin in 2013, which was driven by its price movements as only a select few understood the largest cryptocurrency.