The total value of assets deposited in a protocol at current prices.
Last verified 13 September 2026 · written by the DexLadder team
What it means
The total value of assets deposited in a protocol at current prices.
Why it matters when you trade
TVL is the industry's favourite size metric and among its least reliable. It moves with token prices as much as with deposits, double-counts assets wrapped and redeposited across protocols, and can be rented for the duration of an incentive programme. Useful for relative scale and trend; useless as a measure of safety or of real economic activity.
Worked example
A protocol's TVL "grows" 40% in a week purely because its governance token rallied — no new capital arrived.
See it on live markets
DexLadder runs total value locked (tvl) against live market and pool data, with simulated capital, so you can watch it act on an order instead of reading about it — no account, no wallet, nothing installed.