AAVE Jumps After Citrini Research Bets On DeFi Tokens’ $157T Tokenization Opportunity

Aave (AAVE) edged higher on Saturday, outperforming Bitcoin (BTC) and becoming the clearest gainer among five decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens Citrini Research reportedly named in its tokenization basket this week.

Citrini, an independent financial and thematic investment research firm, published the basket on Thursday, explaining that moving traditional assets onto blockchains could expand on-chain trading, lending and payment markets, according to a CoinDesk report. The scale gap was the starting point for the argument.

Citrini said the question for investors was not whether more assets get tokenized, but “where the economics accrue.” It described an onchain ecosystem that now ran from tokenized treasuries, equities, and options to programmable debt, lending, payments, and yield protocols - “entire financial applications that simply didn’t exist a few years ago.”

Bitcoin Extends Weekly Losses As Ether.fi Slides, Pendle And Uniswap Edge Higher

That distinction was showing up in the prices. While AAVE gained, the rest of the group barely moved. Pendle (PENDLE) gained 0.8%, and Uniswap (UNI) gained 0.3%, both only slightly ahead of Bitcoin, which was up only 0.2% in the last 24 hours. Ether.fi (ETHFI) went the other way, falling 5.5% over the past 24 hours.