DFINITY founder Dominic Williams has accused parts of the crypto data industry of misreporting the Internet Computer’s decentralised finance figures, saying the issue is not open to interpretation and should be corrected immediately.
Posting on X, Williams said that for more than four years the total value locked on ICP platforms has been excluded from industry-wide DeFi statistics, despite the scale of assets held within its on-chain governance systems. He pointed to the Network Nervous System and Service Nervous Systems, which together account for more than $800 million, and said their omission has distorted how the ecosystem is represented.
Williams characterised the continued publication of these figures as disinformation, arguing there is no reasonable basis for excluding ICP’s numbers when comparable structures on other networks are counted. He added that the NNS ranked as the world’s largest decentralised autonomous organisation by TVL for years, yet remained absent from mainstream datasets.
Responding to questions about how the situation might change, Williams said some corrective steps are already within ICP’s control. He noted that Caffeine plans to export builder repositories to GitHub by default, making development activity easier for analytics platforms to track. Premium users will be able to disable the feature, but the default setting is intended to remove a common excuse used to justify incomplete data.
He also made clear that technical transparency alone may not resolve the issue. Where figures continue to be excluded without justification, Williams said legal options may need to be considered. His comments suggest growing frustration with what he views as an entrenched pattern rather than a misunderstanding.
The issue is not isolated to ICP. Users in the discussion drew parallels with Cardano, another network whose supporters argue that standard metrics fail to reflect its structure and usage. Williams agreed that the problem appears systemic, affecting projects that do not fit neatly into prevailing DeFi templates.
Industry analytics firms typically apply strict definitions when calculating TVL, often prioritising protocols that resemble Ethereum-era DeFi models. ICP’s governance-led architecture does not follow that pattern, but Williams’ position is that difference in design does not justify exclusion, particularly when the assets are locked on-chain and subject to transparent rules.
For ICP, the message is direct. The numbers exist, they are verifiable, and their absence from industry totals is not a matter of opinion. Whether data providers update their methodologies voluntarily or face external pressure will determine how quickly that misrepresentation is addressed.
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