What is total value locked?

TVL adds up the tokens a protocol's contracts hold (collateral in a lending market, reserves in AMM pools, deposits in a staking protocol) and prices them in dollars. DefiLlama is the most used public source and breaks TVL down by protocol, chain and category.

It is a rough gauge of size and trust: this much capital is willing to sit in these contracts. People use it to rank chains and protocols, and it swings hard when a narrative picks up a new chain.

It is also the number most people misread. TVL is priced in dollars, so it rises and falls with token prices even when nobody deposits or withdraws anything. The same dollar can be counted twice when a token is deposited, borrowed and deposited again somewhere else. And incentive programs rent TVL that leaves the week the rewards stop.

Take a protocol that drops from $2 billion to $1.5 billion in a week while its main collateral token falls 25 percent. Deposits may not have moved at all. Measuring TVL in tokens instead of dollars separates price moves from real flows.

Also called: TVL.

The chain pulse shows DefiLlama TVL for Base or Robinhood Chain, with its 7-day change and a 30-day line. Raydium pools shows TVL for each pool and for Raydium as a whole, and the Hyperliquid pulse shows the HLP vault's TVL, its account value. The L2 scoreboard uses L2BEAT's total value secured instead, a wider count that includes bridged and natively minted tokens whether or not they sit in an app, next to growthepie activity data (CC BY 4.0). Market flows tracks DefiLlama stablecoin supply, and Stablecoin risk shows each stablecoin's supply and which chains hold most of it. There is no built-in ranking of DeFi protocols by TVL.

• Chain pulse
• L2 scoreboard
• Market flows
• Stablecoin risk

• DeFi
• Stablecoin supply
• Cross-chain bridge
• Lending market