Hello everyone. This is my first forum post here so forgive me if I mess up any formatting or tagging.
I used to work in blockchain marketing so I’m mostly just offering a marketing perspective here. Unfortunately, while I understand various technical concepts, I’m not a dev so I have limited programming knowledge.
I was reading Gavin’s “Polkadot 2023 Roundup” and he mentioned “$250m of USDC alone sits on the Polkadot Asset Hub, with more in USDT contributing to the ecosystem’s stablecoin total.”
If you go on a website like Defillama, these statistics are not represented at all. The total TVL listed for all Polkadot parachains is $464.4m (at time of writing, with every “Include in TVL” box checked). Using Gavin’s numbers, this TVL should be significantly higher.
The problem is that people outside of Polkadot’s ecosystem might not realize how much value is actually in the ecosystem, and this may discourage them from entering Polkadot’s DeFi ecosystem. After all, Defillama is the first result you get after searching “Polkadot TVL” on Google and no other result shows the proper TVL numbers either. It’s excessively inconvenient to gather accurate Polkadot TVL numbers - requiring a process that the average person probably doesn’t want to go through.
On top of this, there are issues with Defillama’s general tracking of parachain projects. For example, Centrifuge isn’t listed at all despite having $255m+ TVL total in their pools.
There’s also the matter of both “Polkadot” and “Polkadot: All Chains” being listed as separate entities/stats.
Links for reference:
The problem here is that the combined parachain TVL does NOT appear under the “Polkadot” label. This means that in the defillama blockchains ranking list you see a bunch of random projects listed as the highest-TVL ecosystems while Polkadot not listed at all. No other project really has this issue except, maybe, Cosmos; however, at least Cosmos has its own tab while Polkadot only has “Parachains” (which may be obviously connected to Polkadot for a Polkadot native, but not necessarily obvious for a non-native).
For comparison, you can see Solana’s TVL being listed under “Solana” rather than every individual Solana DApp being under its own label (this is different for the overview page, which tracks only DApps). It’s also listed as one of the largest DeFi ecosystems in the “Total Value Locked All Chains” pie chart.
Now, obviously, this is due to the differences in the fundamental structure of Polkadot vs L1 blockchains. However, when assessing the Polkadot “brand,” I think this matter seriously needs to be addressed. In an ideal world, with a bit more priority on marketing and awareness, all Polkadot parachain TVL would be listed under the Polkadot label and then you could see the chart that breaks down TVL by Parachain.
I just think these should be relatively straightforward fixes that would help increase the general public’s awareness of the value within the Polkadot ecosystem. It might be obvious to us Polkadot natives, but it’s not obvious to the random DeFi trader or LP who is trying to pick between Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, a Polkadot parachain, etc. If we can paint Polkadot as more competitive, it will draw more people into the ecosystem.
Instead, under the current state of things, we end up seeing questions popping up on forums asking why Polkadot TVL is so low, solely because people don’t really know how to find the right metrics.
Example: Reddit - Dive into anything
Anyway, I would love to help fix this but unfortunately Defillama’s process involves building an adapter which I don’t know how to do. I also don’t think I have enough influence/connections get them to change how they list the Polkadot ecosystem on their page, mostly cause I don’t even work in the crypto space anymore.
If anyone would be willing to assist on the tech end or the influence end, I would be happy to help out in any way I can. I think part of this is also likely up to project teams and forming a sort of “united approach” to getting everyone involved with ecosystem promotion & proper tracking.
Anyway, I’d love to know everyone’s thoughts and if there are any complications that I’m unaware of. If there’s a more accurate Polkadot TVL tracking page that I haven’t noticed, I’d love to see that as well - even if I’d still think we should work on Defillama + we’d need some serious web promotion / SEO for that independent Polkadot TVL page.
Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas everyone 