Capital on chain is concentrated, and the concentration is the durable fact about this market rather than a stage it is passing through. One chain holds most of it, and the challengers have been challengers for several years.
| Chain | Value locked | Share | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | $46.0bn | 62.9% | the settlement layer most institutional custody supports |
| Solana | $5.9bn | 8.1% | a single high-throughput chain with no rollup layer |
| BSC | $5.7bn | 7.8% | an exchange-affiliated chain |
| Tron | $5.2bn | 7.1% | used predominantly for dollar transfer rather than lending |
| Base | $4.6bn | 6.4% | Coinbase’s rollup, settling to Ethereum |
| Arbitrum | $1.6bn | 2.2% | a rollup settling to Ethereum |
| Hyperliquid | $1.5bn | 2.1% | an execution venue built around a derivatives order book |
| Polygon | $1.2bn | 1.7% | a rollup and sidechain family settling to Ethereum |
Value locked on Ethereum
Daily, in dollars, at that day’s marks.
Source: DeFiLlama, daily series. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
What total value locked is, and is not
The figure counts assets sitting inside smart contracts and values them at the day’s prices. Two things move it and they are easily confused. Capital arriving is one. The assets already there being repriced is the other, and in a market where the collateral is itself volatile the second usually dominates. A chain whose value locked fell twenty percent in a week where its native token fell twenty percent has not necessarily lost a single depositor.
How this was measured
- Total value locked is DeFiLlama’s daily series: the dollar value of assets held in the smart contracts of protocols deployed on each chain, priced at that day’s marks. It moves when capital arrives or leaves and also when the price of the assets already there moves, which is the single most important caveat and is the reason this column reads it against price rather than alone. Fees are protocol revenue as reported by DeFiLlama, aggregated daily. A piece dated one day uses observations through the day before, and every figure names the date it belongs to.
