What Is Total Value Locked (TVL)?

Total value locked is the dollar value of all assets currently deposited in a protocol — lending markets, liquidity pools, vaults, staking contracts. It is the most quoted DeFi metric and a reasonable first approximation of scale.

It is useful because deposited capital is a costly signal. Users leaving significant funds in a contract are expressing more confidence than any amount of social media activity conveys, and TVL trends over time show whether a protocol is gaining or losing that confidence.

It is also easy to misread, in three specific ways. TVL is denominated in dollars, so it rises and falls with token prices even when not a single deposit changes — a protocol can "lose" 40% of TVL in a week purely from market movement. Double counting is common: deposit ETH, receive a liquid staking token, deposit that elsewhere, and the same underlying capital is counted twice or more across protocols. And it can be rented: high emissions attract mercenary capital that arrives for the rewards and leaves the moment they drop.

The last point is the most actionable. A protocol whose TVL is propped up by unsustainable token emissions has a number that will collapse on a predictable schedule, and the collapse tends to coincide with the token price falling for the same reason.

Read TVL alongside revenue, user counts and the emissions schedule. A protocol with modest TVL and real fee income is a healthier proposition than one with enormous TVL and nothing but incentives holding it there. For Hyperliquid vaults you can see TVL and APR side by side on the vaults page.