Remember when COMP was the hottest token in crypto? Fast forward to now and it's sitting around $24, a far cry from those glory days. But looking back at what happened, DeFi Summer feels like a moment that actually mattered for the space.

When was DeFi Summer exactly? It kicked off in June 2020 when Compound launched its COMP governance token and basically invented yield farming as we know it. The token went absolutely parabolic, hitting $372 by June 21. That single move sparked something wild – suddenly every DeFi protocol wanted their own governance token and their own farming scheme.

What made it interesting wasn't just the price action. Compound's move opened the floodgates for the entire sector. Projects like Balancer, Rarible, and eventually Uniswap all launched their own tokens with liquidity mining. The whole thing felt chaotic and brilliant at the same time – you had vegetable coins, accidental token releases, and all sorts of crypto theater.

But here's what actually stuck around: the fair launch narrative. Yearn Finance's Andre Cronje took it to another level by creating YFI with zero pre-mine for himself, basically letting the community earn it. That move changed how people thought about token distribution. Dovey Wan from Primitive Ventures nailed it when she said this brought fairness back into fundraising after years of VC presales.

The cooling started pretty quick though. By September, COMP dropped below $200. People thought the party was over. But if you look at what actually happened underneath – the real metrics like trading volumes and total value locked – they stayed massively up from where they were before DeFi Summer. Kain Warwick from Synthetix put it well: we moved from pure hype to actual infrastructure that works.

When was DeFi Summer's real impact? Not in the token prices, but in proving that decentralized finance could actually function at scale. The governance tokens came and went, but the protocols they represented? Most of them are still here. That's the part worth remembering when you see COMP trading at these levels.