An Evaluation System for DeFi Lending Protocols

Abstract: With the development of decentralized finance (DeFi), lending protocols have been increasingly proposed in the market. A comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of lending protocol is essential to the DeFi market participants. Due to the short development time of DeFi, the current evaluation is limited to the single evaluation indicator, such as total locked value (TVL). To our knowledge, we are the first to study the evaluation model for DeFi lending protocol. In this paper, we build a four-layer lending protocol evaluation model based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The model contains three first-level indicators and ten second-level indicators, covering various aspects of the performance of lending protocol. We calculated these indicators by obtaining on-chain and off-chain data of lending protocol. Then we evaluated and ranked six mainstream lending protocols utilizing the proposed model during the period 2021/8/20-2022/11/10. Through comparative analysis of evaluation result, we found that the violent decline in the price of ETH increase the market share of stablecoin in the lending protocols. In addition, we also revealed the reasons for various fluctuations.