Imagine this: Sarah, a 35-year-old graphic designer, finally decides to dip her toes into Web3. She’s seen the incredible investment returns, the world-changing technology, the hope of a decentralized future. She buys some ETH, ready to explore. But then… bam! Or she’s slapped with gas fees that exceed her monthly rent. She just wants to move her assets to another chain with a hot new yield farm. Yet, almost immediately, she’s confronted with this tangle of wallets, authentication steps, and baffling error prompts. Hours later, frustrated and out of pocket, Sarah is left wondering: is this the future, or a user nightmare dressed in blockchain buzzwords?

This isn't just Sarah's story. It's a shared experience for countless newcomers lured by the siren song of Web3's Total Value Locked (TVL). What if I told you TVL could be the exact thing that’s stifling Web3’s growth? What if it’s a shiny distraction hiding a much deeper, more fundamental issue buried beneath? Think of it like this: TVL is the real estate value in a gated community. It’s a great big monument, magnificent in its grandeur, but entirely unbuildable. You can’t enjoy it if you can’t get to or from it, especially when everything is stacked behind paywalls and bureaucratic nonsense.

TVL: Shiny Numbers, Broken Bridges?

Let's be clear: TVL, or Total Value Locked, is the total value of assets deposited in a DeFi protocol. Sounds impressive, right? Sometimes, it’s even celebrated as an indicator of success, security or user adoption. Yet scratch just a tad beneath the surface, and you’ll find out that TVL is a pure vanity metric on steroids. It focuses on quantity, not quality. It lauds as progress assets that are locked-up, no matter how difficult they would be to access or use.

The issue? TVL encourages protocols to build these walled gardens. Staking, yield farming, token lock ups—all are ways that increase Total Value Locked (TVL). They in turn create siloed liquidity pools and unduly fragmented networks. This fragmentation is an extraordinary obstacle for practitioners, researchers and users. Looking to bridge your assets from one chain to another? Welcome to the perilous trek through cross-chain bridges, fraught with confusion, exorbitant costs, and ways to get hacked. It would be like trying to pass a new law that would allow you to drive across state lines. Then, come to find out, those roads are all privately owned and the toll costs more than your car!

And the proliferation of Layer 2 solutions? Though they claim to offer solutions with scale, they tend to make the problem worse. More chains, more bridges, more fragmentation. The promise of interoperable health IT seems like a pipe dream that’s farther away than ever. Remember the promises of Cosmos and Polkadot? They have not yet delivered on the full promise of cross-chain composability at scale. No, the original idea was very sound, but the reality is that they just don’t work that well.

From Locked Value to Empowered Value?

So, what's the alternative? The industry needs to shift gears. Rather than getting hung up about TVL, we should be looking at the metric I refer to as Total Value Unlocked (TVU). TVU quantifies the amount of usable, verifiable, and interoperable value a blockchain ecosystem unlocks. It's about empowering users, not trapping them. It's about accessibility, not exclusivity.

At the same time, TVU calls for a strong underpinning of universal verification and interoperability. Now picture that universal settlement layer, validating all this data, transactions and smart contracts across very different environments. Consider it a digital passport for your assets across the world. It allows them to move freely between multiple chains and protocols.

Rather than trust-based integrations, we need formal mathematical proofs of correctness and security. This “verify once, use anywhere” process allows developers to ship liquidity to any chain while preserving its integrity. It allows them to easily pull in data from smart contracts across those chains. This isn’t simply a tech debate, it’s about building a new trustless environment, one where innovation can truly flourish.

A verifiable settlement layer can even be integrated with AI. Picture this AI models, off-chain computation, cryptographically verified and made usable across all discoverable apps and all chains. The potential, as you can imagine, is amazing! Now stretch that creativity into using AI to track the origin of every item in a government supply chain or automating complex intergovernmental financial transactions across multiple platforms.

Let's Build a Web3 for Everyone

As you can see the Web3 vision is tremendous, yet it’s being strangled right now by a culture that’s obsessed on TVL above all else. To make the most of our time and talent, we have to stop measuring trapped value and start measuring empowered value. Ongoing fragmentation will only increase user frustration and delay mainstream adoption.

TVU is more than a metric, it’s a growth framework. It values interoperability, transparency, and user-friendliness beyond exclusive metrics. First, it gives developers a strong incentive to create interoperable systems. Second, it focuses architects on building infrastructure that connects.

It’s time to demand more from Web3. User experience It’s time to create an ecosystem that puts the needs of users first and truly unlocks the potential of this incredible decentralized technology. It’s finally time to get out of the TVL gated community and create the interoperable, connected world we all envision. Are you with me?