Recent reports have revealed that two altcoins within the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem are contributing to the resurgence of decentralized finance (DeFi). According to blockchain analytics firm Glassnode, its DeFi index, which includes the eight largest DeFi tokens by market cap, has outperformed Ethereum for the first time since September 2022 over the last two months.

Glassnode highlights two tokens, Maker (MKR) and Compound (COMP), as the primary drivers of this trend, with their stablecoin governance token and smart contract DeFi protocol native currency, respectively.

The firm says the strong performance of the two altcoins may be linked to recent fundamental developments for the two crypto projects.

After examining the situation closely, it appears that the performance may be linked more closely to new project developments rather than general market trends.

Recently, on June 28th, the founder and CEO of Compound, Robert Leshner, announced his departure from the lending protocol and the launch of a new project that aims to bring regulated finance to blockchain networks.

As a result of this announcement, the COMP token saw an increase of up to 83% in just one week. Similarly, around the same time, MakerDAO implemented its Smart Burn Engine, a program that uses excess DAI owned by the protocol to purchase MKR from a Uniswap pool.

The possibility of removing around $7 million worth of MKR in just one month caused the token’s price to increase by up to 43% during that week.

According to Messari, decentralized exchanges (DEXes) are experiencing a comeback, with a noticeable increase in market share compared to their centralized counterparts.

The top eight DeFi tokens show a recent surge in DEX activity, with the volume traded on DEXs rising from 3.75% at the start of June to 29.2% at present, which is close to the levels seen in the latter half of 2022.