Glossary
Total Value Locked (TVL)
The total dollar value of assets deposited into a protocol's contracts — the most-cited (and most-criticized) headline DeFi metric.
TVL is a fast proxy for adoption: more capital trusted to the contracts. It is also imperfect — deposits can be looped (the same dollar counted twice across protocols), inflated by emissions-driven incentives, or concentrated in a few whales.
DefiLlama is the de-facto aggregator. Reading TVL in context — fees as a share of TVL, depositor count, retention through drawdowns — tells you far more about a protocol's health than the headline number ever does.