TVL

TVL (Total Value Locked) is the dollar value of assets currently deposited in a DeFi protocol's contracts — liquidity in Uniswap pools, collateral in Aave, ETH backing MakerDAO Vaults. It's the default "how big is this thing" metric across DeFi, tracked by sites like DefiLlama, and roughly proxies for how much the market trusts a protocol with capital. But the metric is noisy: TVL inflates when token prices pump (you didn't deposit more, the deposit is just worth more in USD), gets double-counted when one protocol deposits into another (Yearn depositing into Curve inflates both), and rewards gameable incentives (paying people to park tokens drives TVL but not real usage). Revenue, fees generated, or active users are usually better signals of whether a protocol is actually used — TVL is the vanity metric, revenue is the sanity metric.