SEC's "Innovation Exemption" ignites the DeFi engine: DeFi's top players' TVL and coin prices interpret a song of ice and fire

Author: Frank, PANews

The cold winter of US regulation seems to be quietly receding, and a ray of light of "innovation exemption" has shone into the DeFi field. On June 9, the positive signal released by the top SEC officials indicated that the DeFi platform may usher in a more friendly development environment.

However, under the influence of this policy, the DeFi market has presented an intriguing picture: on the one hand, the TVL of the top protocols represented by Aave has repeatedly set new highs, and the fundamental data is strong; on the other hand, the TVL of many top DeFi protocols has been weak, and the token price is still lower than at the beginning of the year. The market's "value discovery" road seems to be still long. Although DeFi tokens have seen a rapid rebound in the past two days, is this due to the disturbance of short-term market sentiment or the driving force of deep value logic? PANews focuses on the latest developments and data performance of the top DeFi players, analyzing the opportunities and challenges therein.

SEC sends positive signals: DeFi regulation welcomes "innovation exemption" framework

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently released a significant positive signal on DeFi regulation. At the "DeFi and the American Spirit" crypto roundtable held on June 9, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said that the basic principles of DeFi are consistent with the core values of the United States, such as economic freedom and private property rights, and supports the self-custody of crypto assets. He emphasized that blockchain technology has enabled financial transactions without intermediaries, and the SEC should not hinder such innovation.

In addition, Chairman Atkins revealed for the first time that he had instructed staff to study and develop an "innovation exemption" policy framework for DeFi platforms. The framework is intended to "quickly allow SEC-regulated entities and non-regulated entities to bring on-chain products and services to market." He also made it clear that developers who build self-custodial or privacy-focused software should not be held liable under federal securities laws simply for publishing code, and mentioned that the SEC's Corporate Finance Division has clarified that PoW mining and PoS staking do not constitute securities transactions in themselves.

Commissioner Hester Peirce, head of the SEC's crypto task force, also expressed support, emphasizing that code publishers should not be held responsible for others using the code, but also warned centralized entities not to evade regulation by using the "decentralized" label.

Against the backdrop of the SEC’s Republican members pushing for more crypto-friendly policies, these statements were seen as a major positive by the market, causing a surge in the price of DeFi tokens. If the “innovation exemption” is implemented, it is expected to create a more relaxed and clear regulatory environment for the development of DeFi projects in the United States.

Data review: TVL growth is weak, tokens rebound strongly

After the meeting released favorable regulatory policies, the dormant DeFi tokens ushered in a general rise. In particular, the top projects such as Aave, LDO, UNI, COMP, etc. generally saw a sharp increase of 20% to 40%. But is this a flash in the pan caused by news alone or is it the result of the natural growth of the DeFi industry? PANews reviewed the data of the top 20 DeFi protocols in the past six months.

Generally speaking, the TVL growth of these leading DeFi protocols in the first half of 2025 is not obvious, and the TVL of 7 of them has declined in the first half of the year. Among the rising protocols, 5 have grown by no more than 5%, which is basically stagnant. The fastest growing one is BUIDL launched by BlackRock. This protocol is different from the traditional DeFi protocol and strictly belongs to the category of RWA. Among other protocols, Aave has seen more obvious growth, with TVL exceeding US$26 billion, reaching a historical high, and an increase of more than US$6 billion in the first half of the year. Spark from the Sky system has seen a 72.97% increase.

Although the TRON ecosystem has achieved sustained growth in stablecoins this year, the TVL data of JustLend, the leading DeFi protocol in its ecosystem, fell by 39.82% in the first half of the year, becoming the leading protocol with the largest decline. In addition, popular protocols such as Sky, Lido, EigenLayer, and Uniswap, which have attracted relatively high market attention, also experienced varying degrees of decline in the first half of the year.

Token prices also seem to be amplifying this downward trend. The average maximum retracement of the token prices of the top 20 DeFi protocols in the first half of 2025 reached 57%. Even with the recent market recovery and the sharp rebound of tokens of various protocols, most of the protocol tokens have not returned to the price level of January 1, 2025. Among them, only SKY's governance token MKR has risen by 44.8% compared with January 1, while AAVE has barely returned to a similar price on January 1. Overall, these tokens are still down 24% on average from the price on January 1.

However, the token prices of these DeFi projects have generally rebounded sharply, with the average rebound from the low point being about 95.59%. Among them, the rebound range of several tokens such as ether.fi , Sky, Aave, EigenLayer, and Pendle is more than 150%. From the trend point of view, the recent lows of these tokens are concentrated on April 7, which is similar to the trend of the crypto market. But the strength of the rebound is generally better than other types of tokens. However, whether from the perspective of price rebound or the overall trend in the past six months, the trend of token prices does not seem to be directly related to the performance of the TVL of these DeFi protocols.

Aave is advancing steadily, Uni is upgrading, Sky is transforming, and EigenLayer is rising again

Among these projects, the performance of some DeFi projects deserves special attention.

Aave: As the leading project of DeFi protocol, it has achieved impressive performance in the first half of the year, breaking historical highs many times. It has also expanded to multiple public chains such as Aptos and Soneium, and currently supports 18 public chains. In addition, in order to boost the price of AAVE tokens, the Aave community launched a proposal called "Aavenomics", including a weekly token repurchase of $1 million and a redistribution of income for Aave and the native stablecoin GHO. According to the proposal, 80% of the Anti-GHO rewards will be distributed to Aave pledgers.

From the perspective of product interest rates, Aave's lending rates are not high, but it has a stronger depth, which has also made it favored by many big players. On June 10, World Liberty Financial, supported by the Trump family, borrowed USDT worth $7.5 million from Aave. Overall, in the first half of 2025, Aave has achieved an upward trend in fundamentals (TVL and other data) and market performance, and is still a standard template for the development of DeFi protocols.

Uniswap: Uniswap officially launched its V4 version in 2025, which introduced more flexible custom logic such as hooks and singleton mechanisms and significantly reduced Gas fees. In addition, the launch of Unichain has further expanded Uniswap's competitiveness in the DeFi ecosystem.

Although Uniswap's TVL has declined in the first half of the year, a closer look reveals that this decline is mainly due to the decline in Ethereum prices. From the perspective of ETH's pledged amount, it has increased compared to January. In addition, Unichain quickly occupied a certain market after its launch and has become the second largest public chain on Uniswap in terms of TVL. As of June 11, the TVL was approximately US$546 million.

Sky: After changing from MakerDAO to Sky in 2024, Sky has embarked on a comprehensive brand upgrade. Although Sky's TVL began to decline after the upgrade, another protocol in the ecosystem, Spark, has also exerted new potential in the direction of RWA. The combined TVL of these two protocols will exceed US$11 billion, ranking in the top three. In addition, the price of its token MKR also performed well in 2025, rising from a low of around US$800 to US$2,100, an increase of more than 170%. However, MakerDAO's upgrade plan, "The End Game", is obviously a relatively complex reorganization, involving everything from governance mechanisms, token economics to product portfolios. This also makes it difficult for the market to form a simple perception of it, which is not conducive to market dissemination.

EigenLayer: EigenLayer pioneered the new concept of "restaking". Since its launch, EigenLayer's TVL has achieved explosive growth to $12.4 billion, and has now become the third-ranked DeFi protocol. Although the concept of restaking began to die out after a period of popularity in 2024, and EigenLayer's TVL also entered a decline, since April, EigenLayer's TVL data has clearly entered a new growth cycle, growing from $7 billion to $12.4 billion in less than 2 months, an increase of 77%. After removing the concept, perhaps the true value of restaking is being redefined by the market.

Lido: As a leading project in the field of liquidity pledge, Lido once dominated the market with stETH, and its TVL once reached nearly 40 billion US dollars in 2024. However, since the second half of 2024, with the rapid growth of Ethereum L2, Lido, which is overly concentrated on the Ethereum mainnet (the Ethereum mainnet accounts for more than 99%), has shown a downward trend, and its TVL has also been declining. Its tokens are not obvious in the recent rebound. The maximum increase from the low point to 61% on June 10 is far lower than the average of the top 20 DeFi tokens. At present, Lido's total TVL is still ranked second after Aave. For Lido, the scale effect is still there. It’s just that how to quickly transform and apply to more markets may be the top priority to maintain a leading position.

The SEC's regulatory shift has undoubtedly injected a shot in the arm for the US DeFi market. The regulatory uncertainty that has plagued the project parties for a long time is expected to ease, and pending innovations such as the Uniswap fee switch may be truly implemented. The trend revealed by the data is also worth pondering: Although Ethereum is still the main carrier of TVL, the development momentum of DeFi has increasingly shown its independence, and even began to feed back the value of the underlying public chain. As Bitwise analyst Danny Nelson said, "The DeFi ecosystem is becoming the engine of ETH's rise." In the future, the clarification of supervision will attract more traditional financial capital to enter the DeFi field with a lower risk preference, bringing valuable fresh blood; at the same time, the attempts of giants such as BlackRock to launch unique DeFi products not only herald a broader prospect of integration, but also mean that the competition for the incremental market will be more intense. This "final battle" opened by the relaxation of supervision may be a new starting point for DeFi to mature and deeply integrate with traditional finance.