Top 5 DeFi Protocols by TVL — April 2026

DeFi total value locked sits at $186B as of late April. The top five list looks meaningfully different from a year ago.

Lido remains in the top spot at $42B in liquid-staked ETH, despite slow share-loss to centralized alternatives. EigenLayer holds second at $28B with restaking primitives that have become the backbone of modular blockspace. AAVE rounds out third at $24B.

Two interesting entrants are Pendle at $14B (yield-tokenization protocols are now genuinely a category) and Ethena at $11B, whose USDe synthetic-dollar product has held its peg through two volatility events.