TVL, total value locked, is the money sitting in a protocol's contracts.
People use it to gauge how big or trusted a DeFi app is.
Higher TVL doesn't always mean safer or busier.
Pair it with real volume before you judge.
Ever wonder why a pool shows WETH instead of ETH?
ETH came before the token standard most other tokens use, so it doesn't behave like them inside contracts. Wrapping fixes that.
You lock 1 ETH and get 1 WETH, which follows the standard and works cleanly in DeFi.
Liquidity quality is turning into something you can measure and compare.
For a trader, that's what decides your fill, how deep the book is and how steady the spread stays under pressure.
