In the 2021 altcoin cycle, Cardano reached a 96B market cap with roughly 30B supply in circulation. $ADA went to $3. And a lot of people looked at that and thought real money was flooding in. It wasn’t. Of course 96B did not actually enter the project. What really happened was much simpler. There were aggressive buyers pushing price higher in a market with far less depth. Now look at today. You open DefiLlama and see protocols like Aave, Lido, and Morpho sitting on billions of dollars of real capital. Aave’s TVL is even higher than it was around the 2021 peak. But token prices are not inflating the same way. That difference matters. In 2021, even limited liquidity could push valuations much higher because the market was willing to chase risk. Today, real capital is already inside the ecosystem. But the appetite to take risk is missing. The money is there. It just is not reaching for the same kind of upside. It is sitting still. Waiting. Waiting for the bottom to feel confirmed. Waiting for trend to look cleaner. Waiting for the risks to fade. That is the real difference between then and now. Back then, less money could create a bigger move. Today, more money is present, but it is parked defensively. And until that changes, TVL alone will not give people the kind of token expansion they keep expecting.