DefiLlama Review: Free TVL Data That Beats Most Paid Tools

Every DeFi news story eventually needs a number: how much money sits in a protocol, how a chain's activity moved this week, whether a yield is real or a temporary incentive. We used DefiLlama as our only source for those numbers for a week and tracked where the free tier ran out.

The number every DeFi story starts with

DefiLlama's homepage leads with a single running total: value locked across more than 7,000 protocols and 520-plus chains, updated live and broken down by chain in a chart anyone can filter. That chart is the reason DefiLlama became the default citation in DeFi reporting rather than a nice-to-have; when a chain's TVL doubles or a protocol drains overnight, this page shows it before most news outlets do. Nothing on that front page sits behind a login, a paywall or an email capture form, which is rare enough among data sites that it's worth stating plainly.

Why its numbers sometimes disagree with a protocol's own page

DefiLlama applies a stricter counting method than many protocols use for their own marketing: it excludes tokens that aren't actually in circulation and works to avoid counting the same locked value twice across nested positions. That produces a TVL figure that can read lower than what a project posts on its own site, which is a feature for a researcher who wants the conservative number, not a bug to work around. Knowing which number you're quoting, and from where, matters more than treating either figure as neutral fact.

Yields, without the sponsored placement problem

The yield tracker covers more than 15,000 pools spread across 498 protocols and 102 chains, ranked by APY with the underlying tokens and risk flags shown next to each entry. Unlike a lot of yield aggregator marketing pages, nothing here is a paid placement; the list sorts by the numbers DefiLlama pulls directly from each protocol's contracts. That makes it a faster starting point for checking whether an advertised yield is real than reading a project's own landing page copy.

Where the free tier stops

Everything above costs nothing and needs no account. The wall shows up once you want to export data in bulk: CSV downloads, custom dashboards and unlimited LlamaAI queries all sit behind the $49 a month Pro plan, or $490 billed yearly. LlamaAI itself throttles to five questions a day even during the seven-day free trial, so testing whether the AI layer is worth paying for takes patience.