Liquidity market place protocol Benqi has reached $1 billion in total value locked, or TVL, less than a week after launching on the Avalanche (AVAX) network, a major milestone that highlights the explosive growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) lending services.

Benqi Finance appear the milestone on Twitter tardily Sunday, where it thanked its community for the overwhelming support.

The protocol generated $200 million in TVL in the first 24 hours and $500 1000000 in the beginning ii days, as per the update from Aug. 21.

In DeFi, full value locked refers to the assets that are currently being staked on a specific protocol. The figure doesn't represent outstanding loans, but the full supply that is being secured by a specific awarding.

Industry-broad TVL data shows a massive upsurge in DeFi activity. At the time of writing, nearly $160 billion in TVL was reported across the DeFi ecosystem. Aave is the biggest market actor, representing eight.82% of TVL. Interestingly, Aave reached the $1 billion TVL milestone many months after it first launched.

Related: Aave price hits ii-month high on Wall Street'south DeFi adoption hopes

The Barrage smart contract platform has seen a swarm of activeness recently, with Pangolin — another DeFi protocol focused on decentralized exchange services — reaching over $320 million in TVL.

Avalanche is doing its part to attract more than developers to its platform, having only recently announced a $180 million liquidity mining incentive program. The program, dubbed Barrage Rush, encourages more applications and tokens to migrate over to the Avalanche platform.

When asked about what makes Avalanche such an attractive platform for developers, Benqi co-founder J.D. Gagnon told Cointelegraph information technology has a lot to practise with the optimized feel, both for users and builders:

"Firstly, Avalanche, the C-chain (the smart contract concatenation) in particular, is a wonderful ecosystem to experience, both as a user and every bit a builder. The fast certitude, depression fees and security guarantees makes it 10x amend than many other networks. Many users have been excluded from participating in the DeFi blast on Ethereum due to high transaction costs, an effect that is largely resolved on Avalanche."

Related: Barrage Rush to requite out more than 180M in DeFi incentives

Regarding the growth of DeFi, Gagnon said the recent growth of Binance Smart Chain and Polygon "have shown there is a meaning appetite for cheap, efficient and secure networks for economic activity." He expects Barrage to be a meaning source of that growth in the time to come.