2025's Five Hottest DeFi Protocols

Crypto in 2025 wasn’t defined by calm cycles or predictable narratives.

Volatility hit fresh extremes, institutions piled in faster than anyone expected, and capital ricocheted across chains as new primitives emerged in real time. Amid that chaos, a distinct group of apps rose above the noise, fundamentally impacting the direction of DeFi.

Today, we’re illuminating the top five most influential DeFi protocols of 2025. 👇

🪙 Ethena

Ethena synthesizes dollars that produce native yield from volatile crypto assets, like ETH and BTC. By holding spot crypto exposure and shorting an equal value of perpetual futures, Ethena can stabilize the value of its crypto portfolio in dollar terms while (typically) earning funding payments on its perpetual short position.

Although Ethena is still reeling from the aftermath of crypto’s October 10 liquidation crisis – the protocol has steadily lost over half of its deposits amid low funding rates and non-specific yield fund solvency concerns in the weeks since the largest wipeout in crypto history – there is no doubt it ranks as one of the most influential DeFi applications of 2025.

In its march to the top this year, Ethena notched a series of landmark achievements that underscored its rapid evolution into a cornerstone of the crypto economy. Key Ethena milestones in 2025 include:

• Record Reserves: Immediately before its most recent deposit downturn began on October 10, Ethena achieved total reserves of nearly $15B, an impressive rate of growth for a DeFi protocol that held just under $2.5B the year prior.
• Credit Craze: Ethena’s native yield infatuated the crypto credit markets in 2025. In September, Aave held $8.5B of Ethena assets as collateral, half of which was in the form of rehypothecated Pendle principal tokens. 
• Ecosystem Expansion: Ethena was selected to reserve other private-label stablecoins, like Jupiter’s JupUSD and MegaETH’s MegaUSD, and was recently integrated by UR Global, a Mantle-backed neobank available across 45+ countries.

💱 Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid is the top onchain perps trading venue by volume, empowering speculators with up to 40x leverage on a wide array of crypto-native assets.

In February 2025, Hyperliquid released the HyperEVM, a general-purpose blockchain that houses the Hyperliquid exchange and enables DeFi composability. In October, the HIP-3 upgrade was adopted, allowing the Hyperliquid community to create custom markets.

Despite increased competition from perp DEX imitators like Aster and Lighter, Hyperliquid continues to rank third among crypto projects by revenue over the past year, trailing only Tether and Circle. Notable Hyperliquid achievements in 2025 include:

• Flipping TradFi: Hyperliquid was a revenue phenom in 2025. The exchange has produced over $1M of fees every single day since July, putting its bottom line on par with that of NASDAQ, a TradFi competitor with more than 800 times as many employees.
• Derivatives Domination: During the first half of 2025, Hyperliquid represented well over 90% of open interest in onchain perps. While Hyperliquid’s previously uncontested grip has slipped in recent months, the crypto derivatives exchange continues to control half of the onchain perps market.
• Interface Integrations: Hyperliquid perpetuals received premium placement in Phantom, MetaMask, and Rabby as crypto wallet providers sought to capitalize on the excitement for crypto leverage trading. These integrations have generated nearly $50M in fees and $158B of trading volume.

👻 Aave

Aave is the largest blockchain-based protocol in existence, entrusted with over $50B of user assets, half of which is being actively lent out into the crypto economy.

The Aave DAO (a governance collective that makes decisions based on token-weighted voting) is responsible for all risk management decisions, controlling which assets can be borrowed against and the maximum amount of leverage that can be obtained. While this setup prevents end users from managing their own risk when depositing into Aave, the design provides for relatively safe yields with minimal depositor insight or oversight.

In a year defined by leverage, Aave sat at the center of it all, with its lending markets supplying the liquidity needed to supercharge crypto credit markets. Major Aave accomplishments in 2025 include:

• Record Deposits: Immediately before crypto credit markets collapsed on October 10, Aave recorded all-time high deposits of $75B, ranking the crypto lender competitively with America’s 35th largest FDIC-insured bank by net assets.
• Ethena Euphoria: Aave frequently touted the success of its Ethena synthetic dollar stablecoin lending operations throughout 2025, labeling it “one of the most successful DeFi partnerships this year.” At the partnership’s peak strength, Aave held $8.5B of Ethena assets as collateral.

🔊 Echo/Sonar

Twin crypto fundraising applications, Echo and Sonar make the process of raising and investing capital more accessible to everyone involved.

Echo is an early-stage investment platform that allows individuals to form investment groups, which invest in private funding rounds for new startups or token projects. Sonar (a product created by Echo) is a flexible software that founders can use to self-host a token-sale. Both products are based around Echo’s eID, a blockchain-based attestation of users’ KYC information.

These flexible early-stage token sales platforms helped popularize a new wave of ICOs by enabling retail investors to participate in curated private rounds and lowering the barrier for founders to launch token sales. Noteworthy Echo/Sonar accomplishments in 2025 include:

• Series of Sales: Echo has helped raise $200M for more than 300 projects from 85 private investment groups since its inception in March 2024. Sonar launched with a bang in May 2025, helping secure $373M for Plasma’s XPL public sale and $1.39B for MegaETH’s MEGA public sale.
• Coinbase Acquisition: In October, crypto exchange Coinbase acquired Echo for $375M. The purchase came as a remarkable vote of confidence in Echo’s initial coin offering (ICO) approach from one of crypto’s most respected institutions. Coinbase later conducted its own ICO for Monad, independent of Echo/Sonar.

📊 Polymarket

Of all the DeFi protocols that made their mark in 2025, Polymarket left perhaps the deepest impression. Polymarket is the leading crypto-native prediction market platform by total value locked and the second-largest application on the Polygon PoS chain.

Bettors on Polymarket use USDC stablecoins to speculate on event contracts, a specific type of financial transaction in which participants who correctly predict the outcome of an event are rewarded with a pro rata share of the bets made by losers in that market.

Polymarket is perceived as a leading indicator for real-world outcomes. Its odds are now frequently cited in the mainstream by commentators seeking to anchor their forecasts in real-time market sentiment. Big Polymarket wins in 2025 include:

• Mainstream Acceptance: Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, diversified into prediction markets in October with a $2B investment in Polymarket at a $9B post-money valuation. Both X and Google partnered with Polymarket to bring prediction market odds to their audiences.
• Regulated Reentrance: On November 25, Polymarket achieved a pivotal regulatory breakthrough when it received formal approval from the CFTC to operate once again in the United States. This approval followed Polymarket’s $112M acquisition of QCEX, a licensed derivatives exchange, in July.