Terra (LUNA) has become the world’s second-largest DeFi ecosystem behind Ethereum, with reported total value locked (TVL) of $18 billion.

Meanwhile, US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawyers have recommended enforcement actions against its founding company, Terraform Labs.

Terra eclipsed Binance Smart Chain’s TVL in late December, an impressive feat given Binance’s native token BNB boasts an $85-billion market capitalization — nearly three times LUNA.

LUNA’s boosted TVL is mostly the result of recent surges in its token price, up more than 40% since the beginning of December.

The amount of staked LUNA tokens has practically flatlined over the past five months, according to ecosystem tracker DeFi Llama.

In any case, the top-two protocols on Terra are the $10-billion algorithmic stablecoin UST, and Anchor Protocol’s $3 billion Savings-as-a-Service SDK.

Terraform Labs is also launching a decentralized exchange (Astroport) and a credit lending platform (Mars Protocol).

Still, Ethereum remains the largest DeFi ecosystem, but deployments of Ethereum-based protocols have slowed. DeFi developers frequently cite high gas fees as a major reason for avoiding Ethereum.

Source: DeFi Llama