DeFi darlings flying

Over the past few days, Aave (AAVE) has intermittently reached nearly $290, territory deemed here and there as being all-time high-ish. CoinGecko says the record high was $287.10, reached yesterday. As of Tuesday night (EST), AAVE was in the low $270s. At last check, Wednesday morning, it was $269.

Obviously, AAVE's astounding rally, analysts said, is an extension of the DeFi juggernaut – with total value locked (TVL) currently nearing $27 billion across the entire sector. That’s about double what it was last year at this time. Back in January of 2020, Aave the liquidity platform's TVL was $2 billion. Today it is $3.8 billion built on the back of increased demand for staking action and the expansion of the flash loan market, a tool for more sophisticated traders and also developers perhaps facing short-term liquidity challenges.

Still, Aave's Finnish founder, Stani Kulechov, almost seems ambivalent about DeFi’s future, which he said “depends on how people will adopt the technology – or even use it.”

Enthusiasts are more emphatic. AAVE has shot up more than 200% since the start of the year.

Listless, melancholic, trading at about $30,700, Bitcoin dropped 4% over the past 24 hours.

The past one week has seen BTC stuck in a $30,000-$35,000 rut even as DOT and LINK, at least until very recently, have been flying (CoinDesk).

Some digital coin has to be No. 101 on the CoinGecko Top 100 ranked-by-cap list, and right now it's Balancer (BAL).

With a market capitalization of about $212 million, the liquidity platform’s governance token has dropped 11% over the past seven days, to $19.80.

But wait. Voyager Token (VGX), which, with six million more in cap, now separates BAL from sipping Top 100 air, fell 12% in that same period. And the Balancer community of liquidity providers (LPs) just approved a proposal to reimburse users for gas, via free BAL tokens, up to 7,500 of them per week through Feb. 22. The stipend doubles as a means of distributing the governance token.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell will utter some well-crafted yet only vaguely specific sentences today.

Let the parsing begin.

Former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm said she expects Powell to reiterate that the Fed likely will not hike rates, not unless it sees 2% inflation, unseen in the U.S. in any sustained way for well over a decade (CoinDesk).

Trillions have pumped into the financial system during the pandemic, which probably will haunt us at least until summer - maybe fall. In terms of delicate-touch, rate-raising scenarios down the line, CoinDesk said, policymakers will, should the economy come roaring back, find themselves at a perilous crossroads.