- Validators make money from transaction count (and the most from tx that can command priority fees)

- Apps make money from transaction volume (usually)

- Issuers make money from AuM

Each part of the ecosystem profits from a different aspect of economic activity. Taken as a whole, over the long term, each one of these stakeholders needs to be making money to grow a healthy ecosystem.

Defi to date is overly fixated on TVL as the north star metric.

But TVL only tracks AuM, which directly enriches issuers ... not the validators or apps that have created defi to date.

TVL is a necessary yet incomplete metric.