Arbitrum’s Chronos reaches $217M TVL with staking, becomes 8th largest DEX

Decentralized exchange (DEX) Chronos set a new milestone on May 4, reaching $217 million in total value locked (TVL) at the time of writing, just seven days after its launch on the Arbitrum blockchain.

With the new TVL figures, Chronos ranks eighth among the largest decentralized exchanges, according to DefiLlama. In DeFi, TVL represents the funds held or staked within a protocol.

The TVL milestone was achieved during the first hours of the day after the protocol kicked off Epoch 1, which enabled Chronos (CHR) token emissions to liquidity pools. The initiation of Epoch 1 also allowed stakers to begin collecting rewards.

Chronos debuted on April 27 to serve as a liquidity provider and automated market maker for the Arbitrum network, hosting core pools such as Chronos-Ether (CHR/ETH) and Chronos-USD Coin (CHR/USDC), both seeded with 2 million CHR tokens, along with Arbitrum-Ether (ARB/ETH), Ether-USD Coin (ETH/USDC), USD Coin-Tether (USDC/USDT) and Wrapped Bitcoin-Ether (WBTC/ETH) pools.

Decentralized exchanges are at the heart of DeFi and are showing signs of growth and maturity after 2022’s crypto winter. “After [the] FTX bankruptcy, the industry saw the real value of DEXs. Decentralization that DEXs bring matters more than ever,” noted Charles Wayn, co-founder of Web3 community platform Galxe, explaining that DEXs and wallets will be the backbones of gaming adoption in the coming years.

Likewise, chief technology officer of Maverick Protocol Bob Baxley told Cointelegraph that the past year has served as a proof-of-concept for DEXs and DeFi. “After all, if you look at some major DEXs, on some days they’re doing more volume than Coinbase,” he said, noting that the tightening regulatory environment in the United States is likely to benefit DEXs:

“If centralized on-ramps into the crypto ecosystem continue to get cut off in places like the United States, then we could see more and more people turning to DEXs for performing their trading.”

DEXs are peer-to-peer marketplaces where crypto traders transact without turning over their funds to intermediaries or custodians. Smart contracts power these self-executing transactions. However, as we’ve seen over the past few years, hacks and bugs are among the biggest risks of trading on DEXs.

“I suspect volumes for a wide variety of DEXs will eventually grow at an exponential rate, especially when the underlying blockchains like Ethereum continue to scale and, in turn, offer more throughput for lower gas prices,” Brent Xu, founder of Web3 bond-market platform Umee, told Cointelegraph.

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