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Ether Outperforms DeFi Market in May, Bouncing From Woeful Start to the Year
ETH is beginning to wrangle back control with rival layer-1 blockchains like Solana.
Updated May 30, 2025, 4:08 p.m. Published May 29, 2025, 2:45 p.m.
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What to know:
- Ether has surged 45% in the past 30 days, outpacing both the DeFi market and bitcoin.
- Institutional interest and record inflows from spot ETH ETFs are driving ether's rise.
- Ethereum's DeFi protocols have significantly outperformed Solana-based protocols in TVL growth.
Ether has increased in value by 45% over the past 30 days, outperforming the decentralized finance (DeFi) market and bitcoin, which are up 21% and 13% respectively in the same period, according to DefiLlama data.
Much of ether's rise has been attributed to institutional interest that has led to record inflows from spot ETH ETFs.
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ETH's rise came after a lull in sentiment earlier this year as rival layer-1 blockchains like Solana took the limelight with a flurry of memecoin releases.
At the turn of the year ETH was trading at $3,340 however by early April it had tumbled to as low as $1,472 amid global uncertainty related to U.S. tariffs.
But now, as documented in an article by CoinDesk analyst Omkar Godbole on Thursday, ether has finally broken an 18-month downtrend against Solana as it begins to wrangle back control of the DeFi market.
It appears that much of that appetite is related to yields -- DefiLlama data shows that TVL on restaking protocols like EigenLayer and Ether.fi have both risen by between 41% and 48% this month, while Binance's staked ether product has experienced a 63% jump in TVL.
The Solana-based DeFi protocols, however, have failed to keep pace with those on Ethereum. Jupiter's and Kamino's TVL have risen by just 7% and 9% while liquid staking protocol Marinade has seen TVL increase by 29%.
Ether's recent performance marks a significant recovery from earlier this year, with increased institutional interest and strong growth in DeFi protocols contributing to its rise.
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