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Data Provider DeFiLlama De-emphasizes Double-Counted Crypto Deposits After Saber Revelation
The website “toggled off” double-counting after CoinDesk uncovered one Solana developer’s effort to fool the all-important metric for popularity in DeFi.

Crypto data website DeFiLlama has changed the way it presents a key decentralized finance (DeFi) metric in response to a recent CoinDesk article.
On Thursday, DeFiLlama switched off its default display of protocols’ double-counted crypto assets, lowering some blockchains’ total value locked (TVL) – an all-important metric of popularity in decentralized finance (DeFi) – by billions of dollars.
The change comes after CoinDesk exposed one developer’s efforts to double count billions of dollars across a web of interlocking DeFi protocols within the Saber ecosystem, pumping up Solana’s TVL during that blockchain’s bull run last year.
Read more: Master of Anons: How a Crypto Developer Faked a DeFi Ecosystem
Now, DeFiLlama users must manually activate the double-counted value. Blockchain TVLs on DeFiLlama appeared lower by default Friday: Solana's peak TVL from November 2021 displayed $12 billion; before the toggle change, it defaulted to $15 billion.
DeFiLlama “will spend the next few days reviewing all protocols again to check again against double counting,” its pseudonymous developer, 0xngmi, told CoinDesk Thursday in a Twitter message.
Given the latest news regarding saber, we've set the default value of our double-count toggle to off
— DefiLlama.com (@DefiLlama) August 4, 2022
This removes double counting among protocols, previously it was optional on defillama but from today we've changed it
Elizabeth Napolitano
Elizabeth Napolitano was a data journalist at CoinDesk, where she reported on topics such as decentralized finance, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, altcoins, and Web3. She has covered technology and business for NBC News and CBS News. In 2022, she received an ACP national award for breaking news reporting.
