Understanding Capital Locked (MCap / TVL)
Total Value Locked measures the capital users have actually committed to a protocol — the one input in our score that does not come from a price feed.
What is Capital Locked?
Total Value Locked (TVL) is the sum of all assets deposited in a protocol's smart contracts: lending pools, liquidity pools, staking contracts. We divide market capitalization by TVL. A ratio near 1 means the token is valued at roughly the capital it secures; a ratio of 50 means the market prices it at fifty times that capital.
Why It Matters
Price, volume and momentum all describe what traders are doing. TVL describes what users have committed — money that someone deposited and left there. The two can diverge for a long time, and the divergence is the signal: a protocol holding billions while its token trades at a fraction of that has a floor no price chart can show. Our TVL comes from DefiLlama, which makes this the only component whose data does not come from CoinGecko — a genuinely second source rather than a second view of the first.
How We Use It
Capital Locked carries 10% of the Value Score. Coins that lock no capital — Bitcoin, stablecoins, exchange tokens — have no value here at all. Instead of filling that gap with a neutral 50, we drop the component and redistribute its weight across the others, so a coin is never rewarded or punished for something that was never measured. A market cap above 100 times TVL is treated the same way: past that point the ratio says “abandoned protocol”, not “cheap”.
MCap / TVL < 1
Secures more capital than it is worth
MCap / TVL > 50
Priced far above the capital it holds
Current Top 5 Coins by Capital Locked (MCap / TVL)
How our algorithm currently scores the leading crypto assets on the "Capital Locked (MCap / TVL)" component. Higher = stronger undervaluation signal on this single dimension.
Worked Example
Tether Gold (XAUT) leads with a Capital Locked (MCap / TVL) value of 95/100. On this single dimension, Tether Gold currently shows a clear undervaluation signal. Click Tether Gold above to see the full score breakdown across all 10 metrics.