Discussion: Venus

[0xngmi]

The reason why for Venus we provide a different TVL than what is listed on their page is because the way they calculate TVL is by summing what on their site is defined as total borrow and available liquidity. Available liquidity is the money that is on the smart contracts, which may be being used as collateral whereas total borrow is money that has been borrowed and could be anywhere.

This means that for the BTC market, the TVL is 1.6B but if you check the contract for that market (https://bscscan.com/address/0x882c173bc7ff3b7786ca16dfed3dfffb9ee7847b) there's only 1.2B locked there and for BUSD the TVL is 600M and on the contract (https://bscscan.com/address/0x95c78222b3d6e262426483d42cfa53685a67ab9d) there's only 99M.

This is the main problem, that the 6B TVL is not money that is actually on smart contracts, but there's also other issues such as double counting. If I'm a farmer that wants to maximize their XVS rewards something I could do is deposit 100 BUSD, borrow 50 BUSD and deposit them again. Under their system this would be counted as 100 liq + 50 borrowed = 150 TVL, whereas on the contract there's only 100 BUSD that have been added.

On top of this, for aave and compound we don't count the money borrowed as TVL, so counting it for venus would lead to unfair comparisons.

Please let me know if anything I've said is wrong, I'm not an expert on venus and just pieced together how it works from their docs and their contracts, so it could be that I'm missing something. Happy to have a discussion 👍

Note that we also don't include VAI staked on their vault as TVL, since we are already counting the collateral that backs it. If we were to count it then it would be possible for someone to deposit 1$, mint 0.5 VAI and stake it to get a TVL of 1.5$ whereas only 1 dollar has been deposited.