A year ago, replenishment was one of the hottest areas in crypto, and projects like Eigenlayer were announced as the next great thing.
Quick advance until mid-2025 and the total locked value (TVL) fell into the sector and the mid-threshing media that surrounded the points of points wilted.
Thanks to all this, Ether.fi, the market leader, remained stable, helping users to generate a yield thanks to liquid upgrade tokens (LST) which can be marked out through the decentralized financial ecosystem (DEFI).
Now, Ether.fi is looking to develop with plans to become a Neobank for Crypto companies and users.
Ether.fi’s domination
Ether.fi, which is based in the Cayman Islands, has benefited from being one of the first movers in the liquid replenishment space, starting a farm of lucrative points which saw the first users receive points which could possibly be transferred to a token platform.
During a period of 10 weeks at the start of 2024, the marked ETH increased from 45,000 ETH to 808,000 ETH. Now there are 2.58 million eths marked on Ether.Fi while the next competitor, Renzo, has around 380,000 ETH.
In dollars, Ether.fi has about $ 5 billion in TVL. This number dropped compared to the summit of $ 9.4 billion in December, but only due to the drop in the price of the ETH, as opposed to any significant exit.
Ether.fi is in close collaboration with its users in order to keep them on board.
“We probably know half of the TVL,” added Silagadze. “As in, we know who they are and we talk to them and have conversations in progress.”
According to Defillama, Renzo experienced more than 60% of the ETH ETH of the platform, TVL going from 1 million ETH to 378,000 ETH, according to Defillama.
From the rest protocol to Neobank
For Silvagadze, the replenishment product is a means of user and capital, while the main ambition of the company is to become a Neobank to compete with Revolut.
“Playing for us was really a way to build TVL and get a user base,” Silagadze told Coindesk. “The ultimate objective is to create an integrated suite which allows users to fully crawl their traditional banking institutions and to operate on a native crypto platform.”
Ether.fi has deployed a “cash” visa card on the scrolling network in September and Silagadze thinks that this will become the main engine of the company’s income.
Neobank has completely become the fashionable word of crypto recently. The Nexo loan platform resumed last year as Neobank and there was also the furtive launch of Dakota, a cryptographic application which will provide banking services to cryptographic depositors. EOS, which was launched as a very trying intelligent contract platform in 2017, also changed concentration to the web3 bank.
For Ether.fi, the plan is to incorporate three products into a mobile application which will soon be published.
The application will include three integrated products: Ether.fi Pieu, which is the implementation protocol; Ether.fi Liquid, which is a automated DEFI strategy manager which generates the best available return thanks to the use of AI; and the portfolio and the Ether.fi cash credit credit.
Employed companies seek to serve the American market have been postponed by a clear regulatory framework.
But Ether.fi hopes that the user -friendly Trump administration of crypto will smooth the way for it to offer services to American citizens after he obtains respective licenses.
“We are in fact going to light the United States on the United States and the species product relatively soon. We just have a legal opinion that we are cool to do so,” said Silvagadze. Ether.fi also requests licenses to operate in the European Union and the Cayman Islands, where his team operates.
The problem of the feeling of Ethereum
Ethereum was the darling of the 2017 Haussier market and the subsequent ICO boom and was the dominant smart contractal channel while DEFI and NFTS hosted the 2020-222 boom.
This cycle, however, the Ethereum network has been criticized for an elaborate roadmap while the market focuses on the same and faster blockchains like Solana.
Ether is currently negotiating at around $ 1,965, having lost 40% of its value in the last 12 months. Solana, on the other hand, is negotiated at $ 131 after losing only 25% of its value during the same period.
“A part of that [negative sentiment] is clearly designed by competing ecosystems. The people of Solana are there every day by speaking to investors and beneficiaries and the media and spreading bulls ** about ether, “said Silagadze.
“If you really dissect these arguments, they are incoherent. But these memes float, and that has an effect.”
