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

Benqi Finance announced the milestone on Twitter tardily Dominicus, 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 starting time two days, as per the update from Aug. 21.

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

Industry-wide TVL data shows a massive upsurge in DeFi action. At the time of writing, nearly $160 billion in TVL was reported across the DeFi ecosystem. Aave is the biggest market player, representing 8.82% of TVL. Interestingly, Aave reached the $i billion TVL milestone many months afterwards it first launched.

Related: Aave price hits two-month high on Wall Street's 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.

Barrage is doing its part to attract more developers to its platform, having only recently announced a $180 1000000 liquidity mining incentive program. The programme, dubbed Avalanche Rush, encourages more applications and tokens to drift over to the Avalanche platform.

When asked about what makes Avalanche such an bonny platform for developers, Benqi co-founder J.D. Gagnon told Cointelegraph it has a lot to do with the optimized experience, both for users and builders:

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

Related: Avalanche Rush to give out more than 180M in DeFi incentives

Regarding the growth of DeFi, Gagnon said the recent growth of Binance Smart Concatenation and Polygon "have shown at that place is a significant ambition for cheap, efficient and secure networks for economical activity." He expects Avalanche to be a meaning source of that growth in the future.