Methodology descriptions

[0xngmi]

When writing the methodology description of a project, the most important things that it must convey are, in the following order:

1. Make people understand what is being included and what is not into the TVL (think of all the people who ask us if we include Y pool of Z protocol into their TVL). Most people that will be reading this won't be technical, so hopefully this can help them understand what we are including into the TVL, why they are seeing a different number on another site and compare between our protocols what gets included in one and the other. In other words, I think we should optimize for this kind of people.
2. The reasoning behind our design decisions (eg: why for aave we only consider deposited tokens and not borrowed ones). People usually get mad when they see that the aave TVL is different but after we explain it to them they are "ok, makes sense". The problem is that for each one that asks us there's 10 that don't and just leave with the impression that we are wrong. This part should explain to them why we are doing this so they leave thinking "wow the defillama guys put a lot of thought behind this, their reasoning makes sense and I can trust their numbers" instead of "TVL is 20B but they only have 12B, they are incompetent and actively harming the protocol"
3. The general source from where we pull the data (something that someone who is not technical can understand), so stuff like "we get the pools from the subgraph and then query them through on-chain methods". This can help them understand if our TVL is actually wrong or missing something ("they are using a subgraph that is outdated" or "I'll ask the team if this subgraph is ok") or if the TVL is different because of design decisions ("everything seems fine but it seems like they are purposefully ignoring X for Y reasons") or something else ("they are getting prices from coingecko but ibEUR is not there so they are missing that part of the TVL")
4. The nitty gritty technical details. If someone is technically-savvy they can just directly read the code so it's not that important to get everything down correctly here
5. Details about the adapter, such as the use of UST instead of PAI or currencies that are changed

Here are some tweets about methodology (these are centered around the why):

• https://twitter.com/0xngmi/status/1400851818641506311
• https://twitter.com/0xngmi/status/1400865824785719299