TVL Growth (7d and 30d)

Both windows use one definition and differ only in length. The seven-day window captures rotation between protocols and the immediate response to an incentive program or an outage, while the thirty-day window smooths those effects and shows whether a change persisted. Each compares a current snapshot against a snapshot taken at the start of the window.

How it is computed

(TVL now / TVL w days ago - 1) x 100, where w is 7 or 30

Where it misleads

Most short-window movement is the price of the deposited assets rather than deposits: a protocol holding mostly volatile tokens shows large TVL growth in a week when those tokens rise and nobody deposits anything. Incentive programs attract deposits that leave as soon as emissions stop, so a strong seven-day reading can fully reverse in the following week without anything breaking. Adding a new chain deployment, or a data provider beginning to track a contract it previously missed, produces a jump that looks identical to an inflow. A thirty-day window containing a chain outage, a bridge exploit or a stablecoin depeg blends those events with ordinary deposit activity.

The equity comparison, and why it fails

Net fund flows. The analogy fails because reported fund flows exclude market movement by construction, whereas TVL growth includes it and often consists mostly of it.

Reading a high or a low value

A positive value means the dollar value inside the tracked contracts is higher than at the start of the window, and a negative value means it is lower. Separating price movement from deposit movement requires looking at the underlying asset prices over the same window.