DefiLlama

What it is

A curated metric set over DeFi, not a query tool. Somebody has already decided what TVL, fees, revenue and earnings mean, written the rules down, and applied them to every protocol on the site — on 19 September 2026 the public API listed 8,308 protocols across 468 chains in 102 categories. What you buy with that is comparability: two lending protocols on two chains are counted the same way, and the same protocol is counted the same way it was last year.

What you give up is everything outside the list. There is no SQL, no custom aggregation and no way to ask a question the adapter does not already answer. Adding a metric to a protocol means writing a JavaScript adapter, opening a pull request against a public repository and waiting for it to be merged.

Pricing

Free is $0 and needs no account for the public API. On the site it covers TVL, volume, fees and revenue, the yields and stablecoin dashboards, token unlocks, funding rounds and LlamaFeed, plus a rationed taste of LlamaAI — one query a day and one deep research report a fortnight. The vendor's pricing documentation calls this tier "Open"; the checkout page calls it "Free".

Pro is $49/month or $490/year with a 7-day trial: custom dashboards, CSV downloads (switched off during the trial), custom columns, the Google Sheets and Excel functions, and LlamaAI, whose deep research is capped at 5 questions a day and 3 on trial.

API is $300/month or $3,000/year and is the tier the numbers on it matter for: 1,000 requests per minute, 1 million calls a month, and $0.60 per additional 1,000 calls after that. It unlocks the data categories the free endpoints do not serve — unlocks, active users, token liquidity — and it is also what the MCP server checks for.

Enterprise is priced on request and is the only way to hourly history, raw database access and TVL broken down by token address.

Both monthly and yearly billing are offered, payable by card or in crypto on most major EVM chains. One thing to watch on the checkout page: it opens on yearly and quotes it per month, so Pro reads $40.83 and API reads $250. The $49 and $300 above are the month-to-month rates, stated as such in the vendor's pricing documentation, and the yearly figures are consistent with the page's own "Get 2 months free". Both read on 19 September 2026 — the checkout page is behind a Cloudflare bot check that refuses ordinary clients, and was reached through a text-extraction proxy.

Data & coverage

TVL is a definition rather than a measurement, and the reason to use DefiLlama at all is that its definition is published in detail on the docs site, in two places — the "What to include as TVL" page for contributors and the "Data Definitions" page for analysts — plus a per-protocol methodology string returned inline by the protocols endpoint.

What is in it: the value of coins users deposited into a protocol's own contracts, priced almost entirely through CoinGecko's API, with on-chain pool-weight pricing as a fallback where that fails.

What is deliberately out, and where it goes instead:

• Borrowed coins are a separate Borrows metric, so cycled lending — deposit, borrow, redeposit — cannot inflate the headline number.
• The protocol's own token is split off into Staking, and LP positions with one side in that token into Pool2, on the argument that tokens the team minted cost nothing to deposit.
• Tokens the protocol itself mints are not counted when they come back in, because the collateral behind them already is.
• Non-circulating and vesting tokens are excluded, which is what stops a 1B FDV / 10M mcap token showing up as 500M locked.
• Native chain staking is never counted for any chain — no ETH PoS, no staked ADA, no ATOM — because it would turn chain TVL into a proxy for the token's market cap.
• Bridge TVL is tracked for bridges but attributed to no chain, and funds sitting in smart contract wallets and assets that are not on a chain at all are not TVL.
• Double counting across protocols is flagged rather than silently summed: receipt and LP tokens redeposited elsewhere are marked, and the dashboards carry a toggle.
• Unproductive assets — one-sided pools with no trading, lending pools with no borrowers, wrapper assets with no provable backing, deposits made to farm points — are removed, and the removals are published protocol by protocol and pool by pool.

The stated tests behind all of that are "if the protocol got hacked, would the money truly be lost" and "is the TVL usable and being productive".

Fees and revenue are modelled as an income statement explicitly inspired by GAAP, with Revenue = Fees - Supply-Side Revenue and revenue then split between protocol revenue and token holder revenue. Accrual basis, negative values recorded rather than clamped at zero, and figures that cannot be checked against on-chain or trade-level data are not tracked at all.

Update frequency, from the vendor's FAQ: TVL, borrows, treasury, stablecoin supply, CEX assets and oracle TVS hourly; DEX volume, fees and revenue hourly for most protocols and daily at 00:00 UTC for the rest; yields and bridges hourly. The site reads its own API and its pages are cached, so the website can trail the API by up to an hour.

Integrations

The public REST API needs no key. The paid endpoints use a key and are documented separately. A hosted MCP server exposes 23 tools — protocol metrics, chain metrics, yields, flows, unlocks, hacks — and is added to a client by URL, with a browser login instead of an API key; the vendor's own skills repository states it requires an active API subscription. Pro adds spreadsheet functions for Google Sheets and Excel. There is also a browser extension.

Limitations

• The MCP server is not part of the free tier. It authorises against a paid API subscription, which makes it the one advertised surface of an otherwise free product that you cannot try.
• "Open source" is an aim on the README, not a licence in the repository. The TVL adapters and the dimension adapters are public and community-contributed, but neither repo has a LICENSE file — package.json says ISC, which is not the same claim. defillama-app and defillama-server are not public at all: both 404, the second of them from a link in DefiLlama's own listing documentation. The component backends that are public — yield-server, bridges-server, peggedassets-server — have no LICENSE file either. The SDK is the one piece that does carry a licence, AGPL-3.0. Treat the adapters as readable rather than reusable until a licence lands.
• The adapter's author is usually the protocol. Listing is a pull request from the project being listed, reviewed by the team. The rules are public, the incentive of the person applying them is not neutral, and how much of TVL a given adapter counts is a code review away.
• A price feed sits inside an on-chain number. Almost every token is valued via CoinGecko, so TVL inherits a third party's coverage and outages.
• There is no way to ask anything else. No SQL, no per-wallet analytics, no entity labels. If the question is "which addresses did this", this is the wrong product.
• Hourly is the ceiling in public. Anything finer — and any direct access to the database — is an Enterprise conversation.
• The free API's limits are undocumented. The published 1,000 requests/minute belongs to the paid plan; what the public endpoints tolerate is discovered by hitting them.
• DefiLlama earns from the swaps it also measures. Its own FAQ says the project is mainly funded by kickbacks from the aggregators used in LlamaSwap, the swap interface on the same domain, plus subscriptions. Nothing hidden about it, and worth knowing when reading DEX volume.

Alternatives

Token Terminal covers a narrower set of protocols with a stricter accounting frame and sells the API as a separate product. Dune and Flipside sit on the other side of this category entirely — you write the query and own the definition, which is the opposite trade to the one made here.

Trading Strategy narrows the same field to vaults — normalised returns, TVL and risk across 117 protocols — and is the one to read with its own conflict in mind, since the vendor ranks vaults and also operates them.