TVL

TVL stands for total value locked, which in the DeFi world means the amount of money that a single DEX, dApp or the entire ecosystem is holding inside it.

It is also called total locked value (TLV). While the early iterations of DeFi were launched in 2017, the bumper year for DeFi was 2020, with TVL growing from a value of $662 million in, to over $275 billion by November 2021. TVL is often used as a measure of success in DeFi.