Major decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms have seen a broad decline in the total value locked (TVL) over the past week, with only one top 10 protocol seeing growth. The fall in TVL came as prices of popular smart contract tokens like ethereum (ETH), solana (SOL), and BNB also fell sharply.

JustLend top weekly performer

Per data from the DeFi tracking site DeFi Llama, among the top 10 listed projects, JustLend (JST) was the only protocol that saw growth in its TVL over the past 7 days (at the time of writing, 10:00 UTC on Monday). Per DeFi Llama’s data, the Tron (TRX)-powered protocol’s TVL grew by 7.7% to USD 3.69bn – close to half of the top-ranked protocol MakerDAO (MKR)'s TVL.

The growth for the JustLend comes as the JUST Foundation today announced that the combined JUST DeFi ecosystem for Tron – according to their numbers – has tapped a TVL of USD 10bn. The JUST Foundation oversees the development of various DeFi projects on Tron, including JustLend, the stablecoin DeFi system JustStable, and the Just Cryptos inter-chain bridge system.

In addition, the growth this week also comes after the relatively new protocol last month passed a security audit and made its code fully open sourced, described as a “historic breakthrough” for the Justin Sun-linked DeFi ecosystem.

Lido weakest weekly performer

While Justin Sun’s new DeFi ecosystem saw the strongest growth, the ETH liquid staking protocol Lido (LDO) stood out as the weakest performer over the past 7 days among the top 10, with a change in TVL of -16% during the period. The sharp drop came at a time of rising sentiment among ETH investors as developers last week firmed up a September 15 launch date for the long-anticipated Merge.

Lido has been widely used to stake tokens on Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake (PoS) chain before the new chain is merged with the old proof-of-work (PoW) chain. Deposits made on Lido can only be withdrawn after the Merge has been completed.

Lido has confirmed that it will continue to offer its staking service after the Merge. According to a recent blog post from Lido, its staking service is intended for users “willing to take the financial risk of staking, but not the technical or operational risk and associated costs.”

Top 10 weekly changes

For the top 10 DeFi projects by TVL as a whole, their change over the past week looked like this on Monday morning in Europe (10:00 UTC):

Top 10 daily changes

Moving over to take a look at the change in TVL on a daily basis, we can see that performance is much better across the board.

Once again, JustLend stood out as the best performer, with a daily growth in TVL of 13%. Meanwhile, the major multi-chain DeFi protocol Aave (AAVE) was the weakest performer, with a 4.5% decline in its TVL for the day.

Overall, DeFi protocols now have just over USD 61bn in total value locked, up 0.5% over the past 24 hours, according to DeFi Llama’s data.