Ethereum's DeFi TVL reportedly grew up to 9x as much as any competing networks

Ethereum released a long post on X to recount the high points of its year 2025, a year that its DeFi TVL reportedly grew up to 9 times as much as any competing networks in terms of DeFi. 

According to Ethereum, it was in 2025 that it transitioned from an emerging technology to the foundational “scaffolding” of a digital civilization, a growth defined by technical maturity, institutional integration, and global expansion.

Ethereum has matured into a global clearinghouse

While other L1s optimized for high-speed trading and retail transactions, competing for users, Ethereum was focused on solidifying its position as the secure foundation for the growing digital civilization, subsequently winning the capital. 

Despite all the high-speed trading and retail apps that have emerged on networks like Solana and BNB, their TVL, relative to Ethereum’s, lags significantly behind. 

With more than $99 billion in TVL, which puts it ahead of its closest rival by more than 9x, Ethereum has gone from being just another network to a global financial clearinghouse. 

That lead it has secured means the network can boast of having one of the deepest order books, coupled with robust lending pools in the digital world of decentralized finance. These deep liquidity stats have not gone unnoticed by institutions and whales. 

Deep order books mean the chain can absorb huge trades without triggering massive slippage in prices, which often costs traders. This makes it a suitable destination for institutional capital, which prefers deep liquidity. That capital increasingly deepens the pool, ultimately attracting even bigger players.

According to Ethereum’s post, 2025 saw this play out spectacularly, with the chain holding about 68% of the total DeFi market share. That screams trust, a commodity that is hard to come by and even harder to retain as the cryptocurrency industry continues to grow.

More milestones that defined Ethereum’s 2025 

The year also saw the validation of Ethereum’s hub-and-spoke model, which directly disproved historical sentiment that proclaimed its L2s as vampires fragmenting liquidity and, as a result, weakening the chain. 

In 2025, the chain outsourced high-frequency retail activity to its L2s, including Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, which gave it the freedom to act as overseer of settlement. Users could enjoy cheap fees on L2s without detracting from the Ethereum ecosystem. 

The outsourcing saw traffic increase on its L2s, but the security and finality of the transactions remain on the Ethereum L1, ensuring that it continued to dominate in TVL.  

There was also the Pectra upgrade, which made smart wallets a global standard. Next in the technical pipeline was the Fusaka upgrade, which lowered fees even more. Both upgrades have ensured Ethereum will remain a global leader for a long time, as it has become a storehouse for where the world’s wealth is stored.

Additionally, in 2025, privacy became a core focus for the ecosystem, driven by project growth and L2 development. According to the X post, privacy protocols on Ethereum reached new all-time highs for value locked, growing by over 60% in 2025. 

By the end of 2025, there were 750+ projects in the Web3 privacy ecosystem with initiatives impacting DeFi, wallets, apps, storage, and more.

The chain celebrated 10 years of going live in July 2025 as well, prompting celebrations across the globe and ushering in a renewed focus on growth and resilience. 

In its 10 years of operation, Ethereum has deployed over 88 million total smart contracts, and daily transactions on-chain reached a new all-time high of 2.23 million as of December 2025, as Cryptopolitan reported. It also boasts the largest developer community of any blockchain, with 32K active developers fueling innovation in the ecosystem. 

“With 10 years of uninterrupted liveness, Ethereum represents trust that is earned over time. Ethereum is infrastructure that has persisted through market cycles and global stress to set the standard for resilience,” the post concluded.

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