Total Value Locked

TVL is produced by reading the token balances held by a defined set of contracts and pricing each balance in US dollars. It is a scale measure of how much capital is sitting inside a system at one instant, not a measure of what the protocol owns, earns, or controls. Depositors keep ownership and can generally withdraw without notice.

Cómo se calcula

sum over all tracked contracts of (token balance x token price in US dollars) at the snapshot time

Dónde induce a error

TVL rises and falls with the price of the deposited assets even when nobody deposits or withdraws anything, so a large part of any move is a price index rather than a flow. Double counting is routine: a deposit that mints a receipt token which is then deposited elsewhere is counted in both places, and a liquid staking token redeposited into a lending market and used again as collateral can be counted three times. Providers disagree over whether staked native assets, borrowed balances, protocol-owned liquidity and the protocol's own governance token belong in the total, and a protocol that supplies its own token into its own pool can raise its TVL without a single external deposit. For layer 2 networks, the value escrowed in bridge contracts on the settlement chain and the value of assets held on the layer 2 itself are different numbers that are quoted interchangeably.

La comparación con renta variable y por qué no funciona

Assets under management. The analogy fails because there is no client agreement, no manager discretion and no redemption notice period: TVL is self-custodied collateral that can leave in a single block, and part of it can be the protocol's own token.

Cómo interpretar un valor alto o bajo

A higher figure means more capital is currently deposited in the tracked contracts and a lower figure means less. Because it moves with asset prices, changes are best read alongside the price of the assets that make up the deposits.