TVL

TVL (Total Value Locked) is the headline metric of DeFi: how much capital users currently hold inside a protocol’s smart contracts. The higher the TVL, the deeper the available liquidity and — generally — the more market trust the protocol enjoys.

How it is calculated

The formula is straightforward: sum every asset balance held by the protocol’s contracts and convert each balance to USD using current market prices.

• For DEXes (STON.fi, DeDust) TVL is the sum of all LP pools: TON, jettons, stablecoins.
• For liquid staking (Tonstakers, bemo, Hipo) TVL equals the amount of TON delegated through the pool to validators.
• For lending markets (EVAA, Storm Trade) TVL counts supplier deposits, not the outstanding borrow balance.
• For perpetuals TVL usually equals the size of the margin and insurance pools.

Network TVL is the sum of every protocol’s TVL deployed on that chain, with adjustments for nested wrappers. For example, if tsTON sits in a STON.fi LP pool, the same dollar value would be counted twice — once at Tonstakers and once at the DEX. Aggregators such as DefiLlama publish a “net TVL” that strips out those double counts.

What it shows and what it hides

TVL is a useful but imperfect signal.

• It grows on net deposits but also when the underlying assets rally — a bull run in Toncoin lifts USD-denominated TVL even without new users.
• It can be inflated by mercenary farming: users park capital chasing emissions and leave the moment incentives end.
• It says nothing about profitability, trading volume, or active user count. Analysts typically read TVL alongside daily volume, fee revenue, and active address counts.

TVL of the TON ecosystem

Through 2025–2026 the total TVL on TON sits in the low-to-mid hundreds of millions of dollars. That trails the largest L1s such as Ethereum and Solana, but it is enough to support a mature DeFi stack: AMM pools, liquid staking, lending, perpetuals. The bulk of the figure concentrates in the top DEXes and liquid staking protocols, with lending and perps still smaller.

TON’s TVL trajectory tracks two things: the Toncoin price and major ecosystem events. The Notcoin drop, jetton listings on centralized exchanges, and the launch of native USDT each produced visible spikes.

Where to track TVL

• DefiLlama — the de-facto independent dashboard with breakdowns by chain, protocol, and timeframe, plus an open methodology.
• Protocol-native dashboards — Tonstakers, STON.fi, DeDust, EVAA, and Storm Trade publish their own TVL pages with historical charts.
• Block explorers (Tonscan, Tonviewer) — show balances of individual contracts but do not aggregate them into a USD figure.

When evaluating a new protocol it pays to look beyond the headline number: check the share of TVL that comes from team and insider wallets versus external users, the concentration of top depositors, and whether the figure survives without aggressive token emissions.