TVL

Total value locked measures how much capital sits inside a protocol or an individual pool, expressed in US dollars. For an AMM pool it is the combined dollar value of both reserves; for a whole exchange it is the sum across pools. TVL is the quickest single reading of how much liquidity actually backs a venue's markets.

Its main practical use is judging execution depth. Price impact scales with trade size relative to reserves, so a pool's TVL tells you at a glance what order of magnitude it can absorb gracefully. It also contextualizes yield figures: fee income divided over a small TVL produces a high APR, which is a fact about thin liquidity as much as about strong earnings.

TVL has known limitations. It moves with asset prices even when no deposits change, so a falling market shrinks TVL without any provider leaving. And computing it requires a USD price for each pooled asset; where OneSwap cannot price a reserve from its pool data, the affected TVL is reported as unavailable rather than estimated, keeping the number honest at the cost of completeness.