Since decentralized finance (DeFi) boomed in 2020, financial market experts have come to terms with a new type of investment and have looked at ways to measure its performance.
Other than market capitalization, trading volume and total and circulating supply, total value locked (TVL) is one crypto indicator that is popular among DeFi investors to assess the overall value of assets – in United States dollar or any fiat currency – deposited across all DeFi protocols or in a single DeFi project.
DeFi assets include rewards and interest, coming from typical services such as lending, staking and liquidity pools, provided in the form of smart contracts. TVL in staking, for example, is a particularly useful indicator for investors looking to support the DeFi platforms with the highest rewards. It is the total value locked in the DeFi staking protocols and represents the amount of assets deposited by the liquidity providers.
In 2022, TVL has reached nearly $2 billion globally, growing from $400 million in the previous two years. With the increasing popularity and value of DeFi in the cryptocurrency space, TVL has become an essential metric for investors who want to assess if the whole ecosystem or a single protocol is healthy and worth investing in.
While TVL is simply defined as the total value of cryptocurrency locked in a smart contract, there are underlying conditions that may affect the value of DeFi projects.
Various elements concur on TVL’s worth other than deposits, withdrawals and the amount a protocol is actually holding. The TVL also changes with the value of the fiat currency or the native token. Some protocols’ deposits may be denominated in the project’s native token, so its TVL varies with its value. If a specific token grows in value, so does the protocol’s TVL, too.
– Why does TVL (total value locked) matter in DeFi?
For DeFi platforms to function, they require capital to be deposited as loan collateral or liquidity in trading pools. TVL matters because it indicates the capital’s impact on DeFi applications’ profits and usability for traders and investors.
When the TVL of a DeFi platform rises, it is followed by an increase of liquidity, popularity and usability. These factors contribute to the project’s success. A higher TVL means more capital is locked in DeFi protocols, with participants enjoying more considerable benefits and proceeds. A lower TVL implies lower availability of money, resulting in lower yields.
DeFi protocols’ market share can be easily identified through analytics firms’ platforms like DeFi Pulse and DefiLlama, which provide data on the amount of crypto assets locked in their respective smart contracts.
DeFi participants who track down TVL on DeFi Pulse must know that the platform monitors protocols’ smart contract movements on the Ethereum blockchain only by extracting the total balance of Ether (ETH) and ERC-20 tokens. DefiLlama, on the other hand, calculates the TVL by extracting the total balance of all of the DeFi chains combined or each individual platform separately.
– How is crypto TVL (total value locked) calculated?
Due to ceaseless new protocols emerging in the DeFi space, it may be challenging to establish the exact TVL of the overall market and determine if a specific DeFi platform is a safe option for end-users.
However, participants can opt for more established protocols using a TVL metric of $1 billion, which should be a secure enough prospect. A higher TVL is better, as it should indicate a healthy platform in high demand with a strong developers team and a valuable use case. All of which should attract more participants and investors, contributing to the project’s rise of the TVL.
On the other hand, a red alert should be raised when DeFi protocols with lower TVL are offering high yields. These might well be promotions, for example, for new platforms that want to gain market shares, but could also be scams because little or no participants have trusted them with their assets.
It is straightforward to calculate the crypto TVL. First, the market cap of an asset has to be found by multiplying the DeFi project’s supply by the current price. Then, dividing the market cap by the maximum circulating supply, the TVL is revealed.
When dividing the total market cap of a locked asset by the total value locked, we obtain the TVL ratio. The TVL ratio can help determine if a DeFi asset is undervalued or overvalued. If the ratio is under 1, the asset is usually undervalued and more attractive to investors. When the market cap exceeds the TVL in crypto, the asset might be overvalued, leaving little to no room for growth.
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