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For the previous a number of years, web3 has been dominated by one metric: Whole Worth Locked. Whole ecosystems have been valued, ranked, and rewarded primarily based on how a lot capital they will silo inside their good contracts and bridges. Nevertheless, whereas TVL has been a straightforward quantity to level to, it’s additionally led us down a slim path that reinforces fragmentation, not freedom.
I really feel it’s time to shift the narrative. Web3 shouldn’t be about how a lot worth is locked away on remoted chains; it must be about how a lot worth is unlocked and made usable in every single place. The trade wants a brand new north star: Whole Worth Unlocked (TVU).
The failure of TVL as a metric
Some readers may argue that TVL is a needed measure for assessing financial safety and consumer belief. Others might contend that full interoperability will increase systemic danger, particularly given the rising frequency of cross-chain bridge exploits. Whereas I agree that these dangers should be addressed, they don’t justify the continued fragmentation of the ecosystem. TVL incentivizes protocols to hoard property by means of staking rewards, yield farming and native token lockups, creating liquidity silos, fragmented networks which can be troublesome and dangerous to bridge. Builders are pressured to align with particular ecosystems whereas customers should navigate a fractured, complicated panorama.
Current developments, such because the proliferation of Layer 2s (a Gemini Institutional Insights report famous how a brand new Ethereum L2 resolution is launched roughly each 19 days) and application-specific chains have exacerbated this drawback. Tasks like Base and Blast are increasing Ethereum’s attain however are additionally reinforcing worth lock-in. In the meantime, interoperability guarantees, comparable to these made by Cosmos and Polkadot, have but to totally resolve cross-chain composability at scale.
Introducing Whole Worth Unlocked
Whole Worth Unlocked shifts the main focus from isolation to accessibility. TVU is a measure of how a lot usable, verifiable, and interoperable worth a blockchain ecosystem can unlock, not simply by itself, however in live performance with others. It’s about enabling liquidity, knowledge, good contracts, and infrastructure to be accessed universally, throughout all chains. That is what web3 urgently wants now: the power to make use of one of the best purposes, probably the most related knowledge, and the deepest liquidity, no matter the place they originated.
To make this potential, the ecosystem wants extra than simply cross-chain bridges. It requires a common basis for verifiability and interoperability, a settlement layer that validates knowledge, transactions, and good contracts throughout various environments.
Unlocking worth by means of common verification
As a substitute of counting on trust-based integrations, programs might use mathematical proofs to make sure correctness. Whether or not it’s a transaction from Ethereum (ETH), a wise contract execution on Solana (SOL), or an AI mannequin inference on a Layer 3 community, a verifiable settlement layer would enable builders to confirm as soon as and use anyplace. This mannequin permits liquidity from one chain to be deployed throughout others with out dropping integrity, whereas enabling good contracts written in a single language to be verified and referenced by one other chain’s execution atmosphere. Moreover, it permits AI fashions and off-chain computations to be cryptographically verified and made usable throughout purposes and chains, in the end bringing collectively off-chain information and on-chain state beneath a single verifiable structure.
With TVU, we cease measuring how a lot worth is trapped and begin measuring how a lot is empowered.
As extra chains launch and as application-specific infrastructure continues to proliferate, the fragmentation of web3 will solely speed up in tandem. If we can’t share liquidity, contracts, or knowledge simply throughout environments, consumer expertise will stay fractured and mainstream adoption will stall.
TVU provides a brand new framework for desirous about development, prioritizing composability, attain, and usefulness over remoted numbers. It rewards builders who construct interoperable programs, and it guides ecosystem architects to design infrastructure that connects reasonably than isolates. By specializing in TVU, and by creating a common settlement and verification infrastructure, web3 can transfer past liquidity islands and towards a really interconnected ecosystem.
