Whales have recently been making waves in decentralized finance (DeFi), accumulating millions in tokens like Uniswap (UNI), Maker (MKR), and Bounce (AUCTION) from Binance.

In just three weeks, these deep-pocketed traders have built an unrealized profit of $32.9 million, marking an 87% gain on their investments.

Whale Activity Heats Up

Analysis shared on March 17 by the smart money tracker Spot on Chain shows an aggressive accumulation of tokens on Binance, with a whale wallet identified as “0xace” snapping up 374,333 UNI for $2.3 million and 1,735 MKR for $2.06 million within 18 hours.

Meanwhile, in the past three days, another giant trader, “0xEc1,” withdrew half a million AUCTION tokens valued at just under $14 million. These acquisitions are part of a larger trend, where a group of four interconnected whale wallets now control more than 26% of AUCTION’s total supply.

At the time of writing, the token was trading at $35.49, a 14.7% uptick in the last 24 hours and a 100% jump in the past seven days, meaning it has vastly outperformed the broader crypto market in that period. This surge has seen the whales’ holdings skyrocket in value, raking in an unrealized profit of $32.9 million per data from Spot on Chain.

DEX Volume Surge

The rise in DeFi token accumulation is in tandem with a wider trend of growing interest in decentralized exchanges (DEXs). BNB Chain, for instance, saw its DEX volume shoot up to $1.64 billion in the last 24 hours, leapfrogging Ethereum and Solana, whose community recently rejected a proposal on inflation reform. Solana recorded volumes of $1.077 billion, while Ethereum had $1.012 billion.

Other networks in the top five included Base, with $385.24 million in 24-hour DEX volume, and Arbitrum, which saw inflows amounting to nearly $341 million in that period.

BNB’s onslaught was led by its flagship DEX, PancakeSwap. According to data from DefiLlama, it raked in $1.558 billion to become the decentralized exchange with the highest trading volume in the past day. Last month, the network revealed plans for upgrades that would introduce gasless payments, faster transactions, and artificial intelligence to the chain.

This spike in activity is partly driven by meme coins like the recently launched Mubarak (MUBARAK), whose value has skyrocketed more than 294% since yesterday. In that same timeframe, its trading volume went up 245% to $147.4 million, with PancakeSwap accounting for 10.44% of that amount.