Data Provider DeFiLlama De-emphasizes Double-Counted Crypto Deposits After Saber Revelation

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

This removes double counting among protocols, previously it was optional on defillama but from today we've changed it

— DefiLlama.com (@DefiLlama) August 4, 2022