TVL is not the goal; TVL is a necessary evil. Every dollar locked in a (especially immature) protocol instead of being locked in a simple and secure wallet is to some extent a security risk.

Sometimes we have to take that risk to get valuable benefits, but locking for the sake of locking should be minimized.

There will be a day - hopefully soon - where we stop using this overworked meme of a metric as a marker of success.

The DeFi pulse days are long behind us.

But protocols do need access to liquidity, so the concept isn’t going away. Hopefully the language and thinking can mature alongside better protocol design.