Many new projects emerge every year that offer alternative solutions to traditional financial institutions. As long as DeFi is about decentralization and the absence of intermediaries between customers and platforms, they use other mediums of exchange besides traditional currencies.
Each DeFi project issues a native cryptocurrency to power its ecosystem and conduct transactions within the network. Therefore, as the DeFi industry grows, the number of DeFi coins has also grown significantly. Some of these DeFi coins started at low prices after the project developed and experienced exponential growth.
In this guide, we will look at the best DeFi coins to buy in 2023 that have great potential for growth in the future. We will also discuss the pros and cons of investing in the DeFi industry and find the best platforms to buy DeFi coins efficiently and quickly.
10+ Best DeFi Coins to Buy in 2023
Here are the best DeFi coins for 2023:
Launchpad XYZ – New DeFi coin to build decentralized exchanges and enhance your trading skills
yPredict – AI-based DeFi token providing cryptocurrency signals and predictions
Maker – Decentralized Crypto Lending Platform
Curve – A decentralized exchange focused on stablecoin trading
Aave – DeFi platform where you can borrow and lend cryptocurrencies
Uniswap – A leading DEX with multiple features to earn money with cryptocurrencies
Compound - Decentralized Money Market Protocol
Sushiswap – Native Token of the Popular Decentralized Exchange
DYDX – A decentralized exchange that supports perpetual trading
Synthetix – A decentralized platform for derivatives trading
Loopring – Layer 2 DeFi Scaling Solution
A complete list of the best DeFi coins evaluated
With hundreds of DeFi coins available for purchase, you might be confused about which coins to choose to buy and which ones to avoid. In this section of our guide, we analyze the 15 best DeFi coins selected by our experts, which are considered excellent investments in 2023. Read on to find the most attractive projects and add them to your DeFi portfolio.
Launchpad XYZ – New DeFi coin to build decentralized exchanges and enhance your trading skills
If you are interested in DeFi trading and believe in the future of the DEX industry, Launchpad XYZ might be a good choice to add to your portfolio. It is a new DeFi project that aims to enhance users’ trading skills and help them understand market dynamics.
The platform will make it easier to integrate into Web3 and provide tools to succeed in Web3. It will provide beginner traders with insights and news about the market and help them improve their trading skills through various analysis and strategies. Traders can also use its XYZ decentralized exchange platform to execute trades at the best time.
LPX is the native token of the project and can now be purchased using different altcoins including BNB, USDT, ETH, and ETH. As it is currently in the pre-sale phase, you can invest in the token at a very low price of $0.035. The team plans to end the pre-sale in Q3 2023 and list it on exchanges at a price of $0.07.
Buy Launchpad XYZ
yPredict – AI-based DeFi token providing cryptocurrency signals and predictions
yPredict is the first AI ecosystem that uses machine learning technology in all aspects, providing free cryptocurrency price predictions and other paid services to cryptocurrency traders, developers and analysts. The project uses cutting-edge AI technology created by 1% AI developers in the world.
So, what can users get from the platform? Subscriptions include AI Signals, which provides real-time trading signals through artificial intelligence-based algorithmic forecasts. Users will also get real-time sentiment analysis on all popular cryptocurrencies. Other services include technical analysis with AI technology and detection of more promising chart patterns among users' candidate coins.
Users need to own the platform's native token, YPRED, to trade within the yPredict ecosystem. It makes YPRED quite important in the project ecosystem, so when the project is successful in the future, the demand for this token will increase.
YPRED is currently in the fourth stage of presale, its price is $0.05, and after the official listing of the token, the price will increase to $0.12. You can buy YPRED using several alternative coins and bank cards. Buying YPRED during the presale will not only allow you to enjoy a discount, but also to use its basic platform for free and benefit from its staking rewards.
Buy yPredict
Maker – Decentralized Crypto Lending Platform
MakerDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that provides a DeFi lending platform. The project has issued two types of tokens – DAI is a stablecoin and MKR has governance purposes.
Since DAI is a stablecoin, it is pegged to the US dollar and is always equal to $1. Anyone can use MakerDAO to open a vault, lock up cryptocurrency collateral, and generate stablecoin DAI against it as debt. Users can borrow DAI equivalent to the value of their collateral.
MakerDAO was founded in 2014 by President Rune Christensen, an American cryptocurrency entrepreneur based in California. Those who hold Maker’s native token, MKR, have a say in the future and operations of the decentralized credit platform and vote on risk parameters.
DeFi coin MKR is a decentralized ERC-20 token issued on the Ethereum platform. Anyone holding MKR tokens has voting rights and can contribute to the development of MakerDAO's underlying smart contracts.
MKR is the first tradable DeFi token on the Ethereum network and a 10x altcoin in 2021, rising from $600 to $6000. After the recent crash of the entire crypto market, the price of MKR dropped to $660. Therefore, this could be a good time to buy MKR tokens at a low price until the next bull cycle starts.
Maker’s Reddit community, r/MakerDao, has over 36,500 subscribers.
Buy MKR
Your capital is at risk.
Curve – A decentralized exchange focused on stablecoin trading
Curve Finance offers a decentralized exchange built on the Ethereum blockchain that focuses on stablecoin trading with low slippage. Its decentralized exchange is called Curve.fi and uses an automated market maker system. The advantage of this exchange is that it focuses on making the exchange between tokens simpler and reduces transaction fees.
In addition to this, Curve DAO issued a governance token called CRV, which is intended to manage the Curve Finance ecosystem. The Curve DAO token (CRV) is popular among investors as it can be staked to earn fees on Curve.fi.
Staking has become one of the biggest emerging areas in the cryptocurrency market, with APYs exceeding most high street bank savings accounts and investment funds. In a sense, cryptocurrency staking rewards are a decentralized form of passive income, with a higher return rate than fiat currency interest, without relying on banks.
CRV entered the market in 2020 with an initial price of over $10, but then quickly fell in value after the market entered a deep bear market. DeFi investors are optimistic about its future bull run, believing that it will retest double-digit levels. CRV is closely related to another best DeFi coin, Convex Finance (CVX), which enables stakers to earn transaction fees without locking up CRV.
Buy CRV
Your capital is at risk.
Aave – DeFi platform where you can borrow and lend cryptocurrencies
Like Maker, Aave is also related to the decentralized finance lending sector and ranks among the top 5 DeFi coins in terms of total value locked (TVL). The Aave DeFi protocol is an open-source, non-custodial liquidity protocol where users can borrow and provide crypto assets and earn yield on the provided assets.
The protocol also enables users to obtain loans called Flash Loans, which are loans without collateral, based on the amount of collateral they provide. To manage its ecosystem, Aave launched a native token called AAVE. Those who own this governance token can vote on the future direction, changes, and upgrades of the Aave DeFi project.
AAVE's initial coin offering (ICO) was conducted in 2017, with a price of $52 per coin, raising $16 million. According to CoinMarketCap.com, AAVE currently has a market capitalization of over $926 billion, making it the 48th largest cryptocurrency asset by market capitalization.
While popular coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance Coin (BNB), Cardano (ADA), Ripple (XRP), Solana, Polkadot, and various stablecoins (USDT, USDC, BUSD) and memecoins (Dogecoin, Shiba Inu) have higher market caps than AAVE, they are not considered DeFi coins.
Therefore, Aave is one of the larger and more mature projects for DeFi coins and decentralized applications (Dapps) that disrupt business models, and is one of the best DeFi coins on Coinbase. Click "DeFi" in the menu of Coinmarketcap to filter for the best DeFi coins.
AAVE reached its all-time high of $629 in 2022 before entering a bear market that dropped the price to below the listing price of $52. Although the coin’s value recovered to $64 in 2023, some investors who prefer the “buy low, sell high” strategy consider it one of the best DeFi coins for 2023.
Aave’s Reddit community r/Aave_Official has over 16,400 subscribers.
Buy AAVE
Your capital is at risk.
Uniswap – A leading DEX with multiple features to earn money with cryptocurrencies
Uniswap is one of the earliest and most popular decentralized exchange platforms on the market. This DEX allows users to directly conduct peer-to-peer (P2P) trading of cryptocurrencies without the need for intermediaries. It was the first DEX to use automated market makers (AMMs) and smart contracts instead of order books in 2018.
Any user can instantly swap between ETH and other ERC-20 tokens, and the entire process happens on-chain, with no fees going to any platform owner, as on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. Uniswap has a native token called UNI that has several uses and is used to provide liquidity and governance to the platform.
Like AAVE, the UNI token has been in a bear market since late 2021. The coin is currently trading at $5, more than 8 times lower than its all-time high in May 2021. Despite this, many investors still hold faith in decentralized exchanges and their potential for mass adoption.
Decentralized exchanges are an important part of DeFi, so it makes sense to invest in the native token of a DEX – just like the native tokens of other cryptocurrency exchanges. Uniswap is considered one of the best DeFi coins because it stands out in terms of TVL, popularity among DeFi enthusiasts, innovative solutions, etc.
The Uniswap protocol’s Reddit community, r/UniSwap, has over 68,200 readers.
Buy UNI
Your capital is at risk.
Compound - Decentralized Money Market Protocol
Compound is another popular DeFi platform, ranked as the 116th largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Compound is a decentralized algorithmic money market protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain that helps users earn interest by lending and borrowing cryptocurrencies.
Meanwhile, users can borrow cryptocurrencies based on their crypto assets as collateral. Compound supports a variety of popular cryptocurrencies, including Dai (DAI), Ethereum (ETH), USD Coin (USDC), Ox (ZRX), Tether (USDT), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Augur (REP), and Sai (SAI).
Compound was founded by Compound Labs in 2017 with $8 million in funding and currently has a market cap of over $272 million. Although Compound's concept is not new in the DeFi industry, its innovative use of algorithms to create liquid money markets, real-time interest rate adjustments, and the ability to create large liquidity pools have made it stand out from many alternatives and attracted a lot of attention, including Coinbase and Polychain Capital.
Compound's native token is COMP, which is used to reward users for lending COMP tokens, borrowing, and repaying loans. COMP tokens are currently in a bear market with a price of $36.54, but the situation may change once the crypto market enters the next bull run. Therefore, if you believe in the future of the project, now is a good time to buy COMP tokens.
For more information, visit our Compound price prediction.
Buy COMP
Your capital is at risk.
Sushiswap – The Hottest DeFi Coins to Buy in 2023
SushiSwap is a fork of Uniswap that emerged in September 2020. Similar to Uniswap, it is a fully decentralized exchange that relies on liquidity pools and automated market makers. Transactions are conducted only through code, meaning that there is no need for a central authority or intermediary to execute or track transactions.
The platform's native token is SUSHI, which is used for governance and utility purposes. Users holding SUSHI can vote on projects regarding the development of Sushiswap. SUSHI is also used to reward DEX users who provide liquidity to Sushiswap's liquidity pool.
SUSHI experienced a massive bull run, becoming one of the best DeFi coins in late 2020 and early 2021, rising from less than $1 to over $20. However, the price began to fall when one of the site’s founders, Chef Nomi, sold his entire stake in the company, worth $14 million in tokens.
SUSHI has been called an exit scam and a pump and dump/Ponzi scheme, dubbed the “scam pump-up-most” for its dramatic rise and subsequent crash. Although Chef Nomi later returned the funds and resumed control of the Sushiswap project, the project changed its CEO. Currently, the project’s CEO is Jared Grey, who recently announced that he is no longer “inspired” by the cryptocurrency crackdown.
Despite all that has happened around Sushiswap, it remains one of the most popular DeFi projects and its native token, SUSHI, is considered a good long-term investment. The price of SUSHI is currently down to under $1, so now might be a good time to add some SUSHI tokens to your portfolio.
Buy SUSHI
Your capital is at risk.
DYDX – A decentralized exchange that supports perpetual trading
dYdX is a second-layer (L2) non-custodial DEX trading platform that provides a variety of trading tools for advanced traders. The platform supports perpetual futures trading, leveraged trading, and spot trading. It runs audited smart contracts on Ethereum and combines off-chain order books with on-chain settlement layers.
The fee structure of dYdX is also very attractive. First of all, traders do not need to pay any gas fees when trading on the platform, as all transactions are executed on the second layer. Trading fees such as makers and takers are very low, and the minimum transaction amount is also low. dYdX enables traders to trade long or short with 25x leverage on BTC-USD, ETH-USD, LINK-USD, UNI-USD, AAVE-USD, and other trading pairs.
The DeFi project also has a native token called DYDX. It is an ERC-20 governance token used to manage the project. The DeFi coin DYDX was listed on exchanges in 2021 at a price of $13, but experienced a bull run that year and reached a high of $26. Currently, the coin is valued at $2.2, correlating with the overall market's downward trend.
Since DYDX can also be staked in Binance deposits, DYDX is one of the best DeFi coins on Binance.
Buy DYDX
Your capital is at risk.
Synthetix – A decentralized platform for derivatives trading
Synthetix is another decentralized exchange platform that is bringing new ideas to the DeFi space. It supports the creation of synthetic assets for trading, which derivatives traders can use to make money on price fluctuations in commodities, stocks, indices, cryptocurrencies, and fiat currencies.
The main idea is not to actually own an asset, but to be able to speculate on its price movement through assets called synthetics. Users can leave collateral in the form of ETH or Synthetix’s native token SNX on the platform as collateral for Kwenta and create a synthetic of a particular asset.
Synthetic charges transaction fees for exchanging synthetics, a portion of which is distributed as rewards to SNX holders. Therefore, SNX is used as collateral and can be staked to generate rewards for transaction fees. The SNX token was officially released in 2018, but began to increase in value in 2019.
Taking advantage of the bullish cryptocurrency market run, SNX reached its all-time high of $26.1 in 2021. Currently, the coin’s value has dropped to $2.2, so now is a good time to buy some SNX coins for your portfolio diversification.
Synthetix was originally governed by a non-profit foundation, which was replaced by three decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in 2020. SNX holders use these DAOs to vote on changes to the protocol and make decisions about the future of the protocol.
Buy SNX
Your capital is at risk.
Loopring – Layer 2 DeFi Scaling Solution
The Loopring protocol has a unique position in the DeFi space. While other platforms have been established as decentralized exchanges or lending platforms, Loopring provides the opportunity to build such platforms. Thus, developers can use its services to create their own DEX (decentralized exchange), while Loopring provides traders with an interconnected system of trading platforms accessed from one dashboard.
Loopring uses a Layer 2 scaling solution called Zk-rollups to provide faster transaction speeds and lower gas fees that users must pay. Loopring users deposit their assets into the zkRollup smart contract on the chain to build a high-throughput non-custodial DEX.
To power its ecosystem, Loopring has issued a native token called LRC. This is a utility token with many uses that can be used on the Loopring protocol, including voting, staking, liquidity, and insurance funds. One benefit of this token is that it has a deflationary system.
Deflationary tokens typically decrease in value over time because a certain amount of tokens are destroyed when transactions are made, reducing their circulating supply. This can be useful for a coin to grow in value because it will make the supply of the coin scarce – which, according to the law of supply and demand, should mean an increase in demand.
Its current circulating supply is 13,314,309,350 LRC coins, with a market cap of over $349.5 million, making it the 90th-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. The LRC token was officially launched in 2017 and has experienced two major bull market cycles so far. The first time the coin value rose from $0.1 to $1.4; the second time the coin value reached an all-time high of $3.3.
Buy LRC
Your capital is at risk.
What are DeFi coins and how do they work?
With the growth of Bitcoin and other decentralized currencies, a new financial sector has emerged called decentralized finance. As part of decentralized finance, applications are created that operate without intermediaries or middlemen, and code controls everything.
Each DeFi project creates its own native cryptocurrency to power its network. Therefore, the tokens used to serve DeFi projects are called DeFi coins. They have multiple uses within the project's ecosystem. DeFi coins can have utility or governance applications, such as being used to execute transactions, distribute rewards, grant voting rights in DAOs, or stake and earn rewards.
DeFi Crypto Market Cap
According to calculations by the Trading View platform, DeFi cryptocurrencies currently have a market capitalization of over $43 billion. As part of 2021 and 2022, the entire cryptocurrency market entered a deep bear market known as the "Crypto Winter," during which prices fell sharply.
The DeFi cryptocurrency market ended 2022 with a total market value of $30 billion. However, since the beginning of 2023, DeFi coins have regained their value again, with a market value rebounding by 50% from that time. According to TradingView data, the total market value of the DeFi cryptocurrency market has reached $75 billion in recent days.
How We Ranked the Top 15 DeFi Coins
Our ranking of the best DeFi coins is based on a number of metrics to help investors diversify their portfolios:
Real-world use of DeFi applications
Part of DeFi is generating yield outside of traditional centralized means. The projects we reviewed above offer users ways to earn passive income.
Growth Potential
Most of these DeFi coins have not yet made it to the top 10 cryptocurrency list, but they have good growth potential. Currently, the DeFi cryptocurrency market cap is in a correction phase, and buying the coins during the downturn may yield high returns in the coming years.
Pre-sale
Presales are another great way to make money with DeFi tokens. The first coins listed in our guide are still in their presales, and they are offering token investments at a fraction of the listing price. In fact, many of the DeFi coins on our list are among the best upcoming cryptocurrency presales.
Passive Income
Some of the DeFi coins on our list are stackable. This means you can earn rewards on their underlying platforms by locking them in specific liquidity pools.
Past performance
We also took into account the price performance of these coins, and some of the DeFi coins in our list survived two bear market cycles, so they can be good assets for portfolio diversification.
Why DeFi coins and tokens might be a good investment?
DeFi coins are the foundation of a new infrastructure called decentralized finance. It has been proven that decentralized products can work, so the question is how they can be improved. Although Ethereum was once the only programmable blockchain with high gas fees and slow transaction speeds, this has changed significantly.
Many new blockchains have been created to conduct transactions faster and with lower gas fees. In addition, DeFi coins are increasingly finding real-world applications in innovative products that serve as alternatives to traditional competitors.
If DeFi can provide solutions that make people's daily lives easier, it can attract a large population and gain mass adoption in the future. Many celebrities, billionaires, and investors have also invested in DeFi and encouraged the purchase of DeFi coins, including Mark Cuban and Jack Dorsey, while Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz called cryptocurrency "the next internet" and linked DeFi with Web3.
Risks of buying DeFi coins
DeFi coins stand out with a lower market capitalization, and their prices are affected only by demand and supply. Therefore, highly volatile price swings can occur after a massive sell-off or buy-in. Pumps will go higher, while they are more likely to fully retrace because they have not established any support on the way up.
It is important to monitor the market closely and understand all the factors that may affect the price of specific DeFi coins and the overall market conditions. Next, it is important to be able to understand the correct buy and sell signals and not sell too early when the next crypto bull run arrives.
Diversifying your portfolio is another important step in managing risk. For example, in May 2022, the entire DeFi market cap fell along with the rest of the cryptocurrency market when the price of one DeFi coin, Terra (LUNA), fell from $90 to less than $2. Therefore, you must diversify your portfolio and avoid investing all your money in one asset.
Where to buy DeFi coins
When it comes to finding the best broker to buy DeFi coins, eToro is undoubtedly our first choice. It is an FCA-regulated brokerage platform with advanced security mechanisms, providing safe and efficient transactions.
The broker also offers a variety of trading tools, including a DeFi portfolio that includes selected crypto assets as a DeFi section. This is great for those who want to invest in the DeFi industry and include their portfolio
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