bitcoinvalues

Data methodology

Last updated

Every figure on BitcoinValues comes from a named source, is collected on a schedule, and is shown with the time it was last updated. This page explains what each number means, how we compute the ones we derive, and where they fall short.

Sources and update cadence

  • Protocols: total value locked (TVL), 24-hour fees, category and the chains a protocol runs on come from DefiLlama. Our database records TVL and fees roughly every 30 minutes.
  • Coins: prices, market capitalisation, volume, supply and all-time highs come from CoinGecko, as do the token baskets (AI coins, meme coins, RWA, DePIN, gaming). Coins trading less than $50,000 a day, and coins whose price in our feed disagrees with CoinGecko’s category data by more than 20%, are left out rather than shown with a stale price.
  • This site refreshes its rankings from that database every six hours, and the per-protocol and per-coin charts once a day. Each page states when its data was last refreshed.

Protocol rankings

  • Total value locked (TVL) is the dollar value of assets deposited in a protocol’s smart contracts.
  • One row per protocol. Protocols that run several versions or products (Aave V2, V3 and V4, for example) are grouped and counted once, with their TVL added together.
  • Centralised exchanges are excluded. Their reserves are not DeFi deposits. Custodial products that DefiLlama tracks, such as wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) and exchange-issued staking tokens, are included, because DefiLlama counts them and readers look for them; their sector says what they are.
  • 7-day and 30-day changes compare today’s TVL with the value recorded 7 and 30 days earlier. A change in TVL mixes new deposits with price moves in the assets deposited: a lending market holding ETH grows when ETH rises even if nobody deposits anything.
  • Fees, 24h are what users paid the protocol over the last day.
  • Fees / TVL, annualised is 24-hour fees × 365 ÷ TVL. It measures how hard deposited capital works. It is not a yield that depositors receive.
  • Market cap / TVL compares the value of a protocol’s governance token with the deposits it holds. It is shown only for protocols with a traded token.

Value locked across protocols

The “value locked” figure at the top of every page is the sum of TVL across the roughly 1,000 largest protocols we track. The same deposit can appear in more than one protocol: ETH staked with Lido and then lent on Aave counts in both. Our total is therefore larger than headline “DeFi TVL” figures that remove this double counting, and it should be read as a measure of activity, not of unique capital.

Sectors and chains

Sectors follow DefiLlama’s protocol categories, merged where DefiLlama splits one activity several ways (all bridge categories are shown as Bridges). A sector’s TVL is the sum over the protocols we track in it, and its 7-day change is weighted by size. Chain pages use DefiLlama’s split of each protocol’s deposits by chain: the value on a chain is what the tracked protocols hold there, and the largest protocol on a chain is the one holding the most there. Chains with less than $10 million tracked are not listed.

Market signals

Signals are computed automatically from the data above, with fixed rules that are printed next to each one on the signals page. Protocols with less than $100 million locked are left out of the flow signals, because small protocols swing on single deposits.

Market mood is our own 0-100 score, not the Crypto Fear & Greed Index. Half of it is market breadth, the share of non-stablecoins that rose over the last 24 hours; the other half is the market-cap-weighted 24-hour price move, scaled so that a 10% fall scores 0 and a 10% rise scores 100.

Coin pages

The technical snapshot on coin pages (the 14-day RSI, 30-day volatility and the number of up days in the last 30) is computed from daily closing prices. It describes recent price behaviour. We do not publish buy or sell signals or price forecasts.

Limits and corrections

Charts drop a single day’s reading when it is more than 40% away from the days either side of it and reverts the next day: upstream sources occasionally record one bad value. Third-party data can be delayed, revised or wrong, and a protocol’s category or chain list is only as accurate as its source. When a source stops updating, we keep showing the last good figures with their date rather than an empty table, and we never fill a gap with an estimate. If a number looks wrong to you, it may be; check the source before relying on it.