DeFi TVL Hits Record $237B as Daily Active Wallets Plunge 22% in Q3 – Retail Exit?
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) reached a brand new milestone in Q3 2025, closing the quarter with a complete worth locked (TVL) of $237 billion.
However, on-chain information monitoring day by day energetic wallets exhibits that retail is exiting the market, as actions have plunged by 22% in Q3.
The “State of the Dapp Industry Q3 2025” report from DappRadar reveals that, regardless of a decline in person exercise, technological improvement continues to drive the DeFi market to report highs.
According to DappRadar researcher Robert Hoogendoorn, “the rise of stablecoins is basically pushing DeFi into the highlight of conventional finance.”
Stablecoins Push DeFi to $237B TVL – But Where Did The Users Go?
DappRadar analysts noticed that of the $237 billion DeFi TVL, Ethereum, which has traditionally dominated the DeFi sector, commanded over 49% of the complete sector’s worth in Q3 2025.
Despite sustaining its management place with $119 billion in TVL, Ethereum skilled a 4% decline. Solana retained its second-place rating however suffered the steepest loss among the many high 10 chains.
Solana’s TVL fell 33% to $13.8 billion, largely attributed to waning momentum around Pump.fun and memecoins.
“More encouraging is the efficiency of different increasing ecosystems, together with BNB Chain, Plasma, Base, Tron, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Hyperliquid,” Robert added.
BNB Chain generated considerable attention with the launch of Aster, a perpetual decentralized alternate (DEX).
Hyperliquid, designed particularly for on-chain perpetual buying and selling, has gained traction all year long and has elevated its TVL by 29% to $2.85 billion.
A rising sample has emerged the place decentralized exchanges are steadily matching the function units of their centralized counterparts.
While DeFi TVL achieved its highest recorded degree, the dapp business witnessed a 22.4% decline in day by day distinctive energetic wallets.
18.7M Daily Wallets Remain in DeFi: Is Retail Quietly Abandoning Crypto?
During Q3 2025, the business averaged 18.7 million wallets day by day, a lower from the degrees seen in early 2025 by means of Q2, elevating issues a few potential retail market exit.
Across the complete quarter, each class skilled diminished pockets exercise, with Social and AI classes absorbing the heaviest impression.
The AI class misplaced momentum all through the quarter, with common energetic wallets dropping from 4.8 million in Q2 2025 to three.1 million in Q3 2025.
Virtuals Protocol, the launchpad for AI brokers, exemplifies this downward pattern. The protocol attracted 10,000 active wallets day by day in Q2 2025 whereas dealing with hundreds of thousands in transactions.
Currently, it helps between 1,000 and 1,500 active wallets, processing a mean day by day quantity of roughly $100,000.
Alongside AI, the Social class suffered sturdy losses. Social dapps attracted 3.8 million energetic wallets day by day in Q2, however that determine greater than halved to 1.57 million in Q3 2025.
NFTs have gained market share and now maintain second place at 18.5%. In the NFT market, commerce quantity elevated all through 2025.
Q1 information exhibits 7 million NFTs sold, adopted by 12.5 million in Q2. Q3 2025 recorded over 18.1 million NFTs bought, producing $1.6 billion in buying and selling quantity.
Between Q2 and Q3, NFT gross sales surged by 158%. The buying and selling quantity spike might be attributed to OpenSea’s campaign for its forthcoming token, designed to reward its most energetic merchants, as properly as elevated PFP adoption led by CryptoPunks, Moonbirds, BAYC, and Pudgy Penguins.
However, pockets participation elevated by solely 28.6%, suggesting stronger conviction from present contributors reasonably than an inflow of latest customers.
$434M Stolen in Q3 as Hackers Exploit Multi-Sig Wallets Despite Record TVL
Despite report DeFi TVL and widespread development, digital threats from malicious actors persist. During Q3 2025, hackers stole over $434 million value of cryptocurrency.
The largest assaults concerned social engineering and exploits, together with a July incident the place a hacker exploited a malicious contract on GMX V1 to govern inner accounting safeguards, ensuing in a $42 million loss.
Days later, CoinDCX suffered a $44 million loss as a result of a server breach.
Most just lately, in September, the social undertaking UXLINK experienced a multi-signature exploit that resulted in $21.7 million in stolen belongings.
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