Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is no longer the No. 3 blockchain when it comes to Total Value Locked (TVL) in decentralized finance applications (defi). That honorable position is now held by Fantom. TVL is the total dollar value of coins that users have staked in defi applications running on a chain.

At the time of writing, over $12.3 billion is locked up in decentralized finance applications running on Fantom. This can be seen in Defi Llama's TVL overview by blockchain. BSC, as mentioned, is No. 4 with just over 12 billion locked. By comparison, Ethereum is still the undisputed leader, with $115 billion.

Since September 2021, Fantom's TVL has increased more than tenfold. Remarkably, Fantom's TVL has also increased substantially (more than 60%) in the past week: a period in which the total amount of TVL in defi has decreased by more than 15%.

Not surprisingly, FTM's token price has weathered the recent crypto price tumble pretty well: it is already some 30% higher than at its low of January 22.

Since the summer of 2021, Fantom has given developers a big incentive to build on it. Unlike most projects, Fantom's liquidity mining program was aimed at developers rather than users. Developers thus had a financial incentive to meet certain TVL targets for their applications.

What is Fantom?

Fantom was launched in 2019 with the ambition of solving crypto's most pressing problem: the so-called trilemma between security, scalability and decentralization. Fantom claims to be scalable without giving up on security or decentralization.