I was asked to give an example of the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. I can name only 1 example from Tether and Circle companies, whose stablecoins are actively used in many countries and allow you to bypass restrictions.
I hope you have read this news last year. TVL is something that is closely related to DeFi, so what if the project doesn't have DeFi in its ecosystem like the previous coins (Litecoin, Dash, Monero etc.).
For now, in looking at the fundamentals of a project, I still use observations regarding communities, developments and ecosystems, that has helped me so far.