DeFi Statistics 2026: TVL, Trading and Where the Money Is

DeFi holds $96.3 billion, which is 45.7% below its 2021 peak and 3.3% of the crypto market. It is also a number that moves when nobody deposits or withdraws anything, because total value locked is measured in dollars and most of what is locked is volatile.

That caveat is the reason this page exists in a rewritten form. The old version said DeFi's market cap was $43 billion and that there were 6.5 million users, neither with a source, and it treated TVL as though it counted activity. Every figure below was pulled from an API on the day, with the date attached.

Last checked 23 September 2026.

Top 10 DeFi Statistics (Editor’s Picks)
How Big Is DeFi?
Why TVL Is Partly a Price Chart
Where the Money Sits
Lending and Staking
DEX Trading
Stablecoins
Hacks and Losses
How Many People Actually Use DeFi
What Could Not Be Sourced

Top 10 DeFi Statistics (Editor’s Picks)

DeFi TVL is $96.3 billion, 45.7% below the November 2021 peak of $177.5 billion and 44% below the October 2025 cycle high of $171.1 billion.
That is 3.3% of the $2.96 trillion crypto market.
TVL swung 46% down and 41% back up inside nine months of 2026 - $127.3 billion in January, $68.2 billion on 1 July, $96.3 billion now.
Ethereum holds 56.4% of it, and the top five chains hold 81.7%.
Liquid staking is bigger than lending: $58.6 billion against $55.7 billion supplied.
Lido alone holds $26.9 billion - 9.76 million ETH from 627,394 holders, at a 2.21% return.
DEXs traded $4.91 trillion in 2025 and $2.24 trillion so far in 2026.
DEXs are now 27.1% of spot volume against centralised exchanges, the highest on record - up from about 7.5% in March 2023, even as DEX volume itself fell 37%.
Tether and Circle are 82.4% of the $314.2 billion stablecoin market, and the two largest fee earners in all of crypto are those same two issuers, not any DeFi protocol.
$1.84 billion has been stolen across 274 incidents in 2026, though per-exploit losses have fallen 74% since 2022.

How Big Is DeFi?

$96.3 billion, on 22 September 2026. The path matters more than the level:

$177.49 billion at the all-time peak, 9 November 2021.
$36.03 billion at the bear-market low, 13 October 2023.
$171.06 billion at the last cycle high, 7 October 2025.
$96.3 billion now - and within 2026 alone it ran from $127.3 billion in January to $68.2 billion on 1 July and back up 41%.

As a share of the industry it is small and getting no larger: 3.3% of total crypto market capitalisation.

Sources: DefiLlama API, CoinGecko API.

Why TVL Is Partly a Price Chart

This is the thing most DeFi statistics pages get wrong. TVL is the dollar value of deposited assets, so it falls when token prices fall even if not one person withdraws anything.

Over the window in which total DeFi TVL fell 43.7%, ether fell 41.3% - from $4,687 to $2,753. Ethereum's own chain TVL is down 49.3% in dollars since November 2021. Most of the decline you see in a TVL chart is the denominator.

There is a second caveat worth knowing. The Bank for International Settlements tried to recompute TVL independently for 400 protocols and matched the published figure for only 46.5% of them, with about one protocol in ten relying on off-chain data that cannot be verified at all. TVL is the best number this industry has, and it is not an audited one.

Sources: DefiLlama API, BIS working paper 1268.

Where the Money Sits

Ethereum $54.42 billion (56.4%), Solana $6.51 billion, Base $6.25 billion, BNB Chain $5.88 billion, Tron $5.72 billion - the top five are 81.7% of everything.

By protocol: Lido $26.87 billion, Aave $19.67 billion, Morpho $11.03 billion, Binance staked ETH $10.23 billion, Spark $9.72 billion, EigenCloud $7.20 billion.

One category that did not exist when this page was last written: risk curators, who now manage $10.26 billion across 86 of them - about 10.6% of all DeFi TVL. Steakhouse Financial ($3.11 billion), Sentora ($2.70 billion) and Gauntlet ($1.64 billion) set the parameters other people's money is lent under, which is a concentration of judgement that did not exist in the 2021 version of this industry.

Sources: DefiLlama protocols API.

Lending and Staking

Staking is now the largest thing DeFi does. Liquid staking holds $58.59 billion across 295 protocols, against $55.73 billion supplied to 646 lending protocols. Lido is 45.9% of liquid staking, Binance staked ETH 17.5%, ether.fi 8.8%.

On Ethereum itself, about 43.7 million ETH is staked - roughly 35.8% of supply - earning about 2.6% a year. Lido's own API reports 9,760,387 ETH from 627,394 holders at 2.21%.

In lending, $30.99 billion of the $55.73 billion supplied is borrowed, a 55.6% utilisation rate. Aave V3 is $18.67 billion of it, Morpho Blue $11.02 billion, SparkLend $5.80 billion.

Sources: DefiLlama, ultrasound.money, Lido.

DEX Trading

DEXs traded $4.91 trillion in 2025 and $2.24 trillion in 2026 to 23 September, against $1.86 trillion in 2021 and $0.90 trillion in 2023. All-time volume is $14.01 trillion.

The interesting figure is the share rather than the level. DEXs are 27.1% of spot trading against centralised exchanges, the highest in the series - up from roughly 7.5% in March 2023, when the old version of this page was published. But note what that means: DEX volume itself is down about 37% year on year (about $409 billion a month in 2025 against about $256 billion in 2026). DEXs are taking a bigger share of a smaller market.

The largest venues: Uniswap $90.1 billion over 30 days (V3 and V4 combined), PancakeSwap $19.6 billion, PumpSwap $18.4 billion, Aerodrome $12.9 billion.

Sources: DefiLlama DEX overview, The Block Data.

Stablecoins

$314.2 billion in circulation across 427 stablecoins, and two issuers are 82.4% of it: Tether at $183.52 billion (58.4%) and Circle's USDC at $75.42 billion (24.0%). No other issuer holds a tenth of the market.

Tether's own transparency feed shows where that money lives: half of USDT is on Tron (50.4%), 47.3% on Ethereum and 1.2% on Solana.

For scale against the settlement layer it is becoming, the Bank for International Settlements estimates $28 trillion of stablecoin transaction volume in 2025 against a market capitalisation around $320 billion - though volume figures in this subject are inflated by bots, and the same exercise elsewhere cuts the raw number by four fifths.

And the most telling fee statistic in DeFi is not about DeFi. Of $23.93 billion in fees earned across the ecosystem in the last twelve months, the two largest earners are Tether and Circle - stablecoin issuers collecting on the treasuries behind their tokens, not protocols collecting on activity.

Sources: DefiLlama stablecoins, Tether transparency, BIS Annual Economic Report 2026.

Hacks and Losses

$1.84 billion has been stolen across 274 incidents in 2026 to 22 September, and DeFi protocols account for $1.17 billion of it across 198 incidents - 64% of the money and 72% of the incidents.

The trend underneath is better than the total suggests. TRM Labs counted 207 hacks for $972 million in the first half of 2026, against 83 hacks for $2.3 billion in the first half of 2025: many more incidents, far less money. Immunefi's audit of 2020-2025 shows the same shape - exploit losses down 74% from the 2022 peak, with the median loss per exploit falling from $6 million to $1.5 million.

Chainalysis put total stolen funds above $3.4 billion in 2025, $2.02 billion of it attributed to North Korea-linked actors, and found centralised services rather than DeFi taking the bulk of the largest losses.

Sources: DefiLlama hacks, TRM Labs, Immunefi, Chainalysis.

How Many People Actually Use DeFi

Nobody can tell you, and any page that gives you a clean number is guessing. Addresses are not people: one person runs dozens, and bots run millions. a16z's estimate is 40 to 70 million real active crypto users against 181 million monthly active addresses - and its own methodology work found only a small fraction of addresses map to distinct humans.

The old version of this page said 6.5 million DeFi users with no source at all. The honest replacement is the range above, plus the observation that DeFi is a subset of it.

Sources: a16z State of Crypto 2025.

What Could Not Be Sourced

From the old page, deleted rather than updated:

“DeFi market cap sits at about $43 billion.” No source, and market cap is not TVL - the two were used interchangeably.
“Roughly 6.5 million active DeFi users.” No origin; see above for why no such count exists.
“Total global DeFi assets have grown four-fold since 2020.” No measurement behind it, and the direction has since reversed twice.
“Stellar is the most traded cryptocurrency with more than 7 million transactions daily.” Transaction count is not trading volume, and the claim traced to nothing.
“North America hosts roughly 34% of all DeFi holdings.” Geography of on-chain holdings is not measurable at that precision.
“Blockchain spending grew from $1 billion in 2018 to $14 billion by 2022 and will reach $19 billion by 2024.” A research-firm forecast whose target year has passed, presented as fact.

Conclusion

DeFi in 2026 is a $96 billion industry that behaves like a leveraged bet on ether, concentrated on one chain, with staking now larger than lending and two stablecoin issuers earning more in fees than any protocol. It is a bigger share of trading than it has ever been and a smaller pool of money than it was five years ago, and both of those are true at once.

If you quote one number from this page, quote it with its date. Nothing here is stable enough to survive being repeated for three years, which is precisely what happened to the version this replaced.