DeFi Saver 2025: A year in review

This has been an odd, polarising year in my books. On one hand I’m glad it’s behind us, but on the other it’s hard not to say it’s been good for the space. Let's take a moment to ignore the erratic market movements often connected to seemingly pointless events, and instead remember that Ethereum executed two (!) major network upgrades this year with Pectra and Fusaka, that all major DeFi teams kept building, and that institutions showed up big with the likes of Robinhood, JPMorgan, Sony, Visa and BlackRock all building on Ethereum in some capacity. Those are all massive news.

And even market-wise, we did hit a new ATH for Ether this year. Even though for some reason I find it hard to remember the day and the celebrations, it happened, it is for ever in the charts. The massive buying pressure throughout the second half of the year from the likes of Bitmine, Sharplink and other DATs probably helped - that was another major new development in 2025.

Let's focus back to DeFi, though. I think it's still worth pointing out that through all the ups and downs, DeFi simply worked. I feel this has become something we take for granted by now, but that only goes to further show how much the space has matured.

Looking at the numbers, the TVL growth may not look impressive, but given ETH is down ~10% YoY, this still seems solid. And let's not forget that the stablecoins marketcap did a +50% over the past year.

I also feel like we did a +50% in terms of DeFi Saver team members, so let's talk about DFS for a bit.

2025 at DeFi Saver

Honestly, it's been another great year for DFS. We have indeed been joined by a number of new team members this year that gave us a fresh perspective on things, a big boost in productivity and just a general fresh wind in the sails. Some of them you already met at events or in our discord.

We deployed and delivered a lot, with new integrations, new features, and even some new bits of the app that we previously didn't recognise as important.

A slight change of approach

For the past long while, our main modus operandi was to keep making as many new integrations as possible. We saw that as our main opportunity for growth, thinking how it both helps us cover a larger TVL percentage of DeFi and seeing how it coincided with user requests "hey I wish I also had these features for protocol X" it seemed to simply make sense.

But the results were a mixed bag, with some new integrations being major successes and others ending up dead in the water, while all had high upfront costs in terms of making full fledged DFS support happen and additional long term maintenance costs.

At the same time we realised that we're not really good with exposing existing opportunities (aka those available within the protocols we already support), potentially frustrating existing users and downright losing potential new ones.

And that's something we finally started addressing in 2025 - making DFS a great experience, not just a great toolkit. This is where our new Discover and Trending pages come in, for example, allowing people to more efficiently compare available options or easily find available opportunities.

Just to be clear, though - new integrations will still absolutely happen, but the aim is for everything to come together and not just be a set of separate dashboards.

Speaking of updates, here are the most notable releases from 2025:

• Fluid
• Liquity V2
• Discover
• Trending
• Linea L2
• Plasma chain
• Automated collateral switching
• Smart Savings overhaul

There was also the latest dashboard UI refresh together with the commands center redesign, there were DeFi Explore releases for Liquity V2, Aave and Spark, there was also Position Flipping, a ton of Pendle-focused features, 7702 support for token swaps, and countless other functional tweaks and UI touch-ups.

DFS 2025 in numbers

I'll do a quick rundown of some numbers:

• Total number of user-initiated transactions: 185,483 (📈up 15% from 161.2k in 2024)
• Number of unique accounts transacting: 10,284 (📉down 27% from 14k in 2024)
• Total number of automated transactions: 50,316 (📈up 15% from 43.7k in 2024)
• Total notifications sent out to users: 30,227 (📈up 46% from 20.6k in 2024)

As a reminder, you can keep an eye on what people are doing with DFS using our Stats page. Though this Dune dashboard is also cool, and there's also the DFS DefiLlama page.

Touring in 2025

I always like to include this segment, because I simply really enjoy IRL events. They can be hella time consuming, yes, but meeting even a few users or some of the other teams we work with really rekindles my fire.

This year we covered Denver, EthBelgrade, EthCC and Devconnect, and some of the guys were also at events in Singapore and Dubai. We had booths, we hosted events, we handed out a ton of merch and we had a really good time meeting everyone out there.

Speaking of events, I have to share a moment of reflection I've had in Buenos Aires. We were in this great pizza place near Recoleta where I ordered a Blue Moon, a refreshing wheat ale. And as I was sipping from the bottle I realised the label said Denver, Colorado.

Meaning that beer was from a brewery almost 10 thousand kilometres away - the very brewery we spent multiple evenings at 8 months earlier. A brewery that's also 9 thousand kilometres away from home for us. Maybe it's just me, but I loved how crazy that was, and I love working in this space and the places that it's gotten me to visit.

Looking forward

While we don't have a roadmap to share (though we might follow up with that at a later date), we still wanted to hint at some upcoming news. January is shaping up to be a big month for both DeFi Saver, but also the whole space, so expect to see a major new integration likely by the end of the month, together with some big news for the team a week or two prior.

In terms of events, you can certainly expect to see us at EthDenver in February. Denver always has great vibes and I'm really excited to see the new venue. And you should be excited, too, because we'll be coming with a new limited edition merch drop.

As always, thanks for being with us, thanks for using DeFi Saver and here's to a great 2026 for the whole ecosystem!🍻

Stay connected:

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