From TVL to TVU: Why Web3 Needs a New Narrative

For the past several years, Web3 has been dominated by one metric: Total Value Locked (TVL). Entire ecosystems have been valued, ranked, and rewarded based on how much capital they can silo within their smart contracts and bridges. But while TVL has been an easy number to point to, it’s also led us down a narrow path that reinforces fragmentation, not freedom.

At Pi Squared, we believe it’s time to shift the narrative. Web3 shouldn’t be about how much value is locked away on isolated chains when it should be about how much value is unlocked and made usable everywhere. That’s why we’re proposing a new north star for the industry: Total Value Unlocked (TVU).

The Problem With TVL

TVL incentivizes platforms to hoard liquidity. Chains, protocols, and applications compete to attract users and assets, often by introducing incentives that reward staying put. But this creates liquidity islands that serve as disconnected pools of capital, logic, and data that are difficult to move between or build across.

Instead of an open internet of value, we’ve created walled blockchain gardens. Developers are forced to choose sides. Users have to bridge value with isolation, complexity, and risk, and every new chain makes the fragmentation worse.

But the original promise of Web3 was interoperability, composability, and decentralization. Not siloed value. Not repeated infrastructure. Not incompatible smart contracts.

TVL may be an easy number to track, but it's the wrong thing to chase and is completely misaligned with the core ethos of Web3.

Introducing Total Value Unlocked (TVU)

Total Value Unlocked (TVU) shifts the focus from isolation to accessibility.

TVU is a measure of how much usable, verifiable, and interoperable value a blockchain ecosystem can unlock (not just on its own) but in concert with others. It’s about enabling liquidity, data, smart contracts, and infrastructure to be accessed universally, across all chains.

This is what Web3 needs now: the ability to use the best applications, the most relevant data, and the deepest liquidity, regardless of which chain they originated from.

To make this possible, we need more than bridges. We need a common foundation for verifiability and universality. That’s where Pi Squared’s Verifiable Settlement Layer (VSL) comes in.

How the VSL Unlocks Value

Pi Squared’s Verifiable Settlement Layer (VSL) redefines how blockchain systems interact. Rather than forcing every chain to speak the same language or adopt the same standards, VSL acts as a universal verification hub, a layer where smart contracts, data, and claims from any ecosystem can be validated and made accessible everywhere else.

Using our Proof of Proof system, VSL doesn’t just trust external data, it mathematically proves its correctness. Whether it’s a transaction from Ethereum, a smart contract execution on Solana, or an AI model inference on a Layer 3, VSL lets developers verify once and use it anywhere.

This is how we turn TVL into TVU:

• Liquidity from one chain can be deployed cross-chain with no loss of integrity.
• Smart contracts written in one language on one chain can be verified and referenced in another chain’s execution environment.
• AI models and off-chain computations can be verified cryptographically and settled as well on the VSL, and thus be made usable across applications and chains.
• Off-chain knowledge and on-chain state can be brought together under a single verifiable architecture.

With TVU, we stop measuring how much is trapped, we start measuring how much is empowered.

Why This Matters Now

As more chains launch and as application-specific infrastructure proliferates, the fragmentation of Web3 will only accelerate. But if we can’t share liquidity, contracts, or data across these environments easily, the user experience will remain fractured, and adoption will inevitably stall.

TVU offers a new framework for thinking about growth. It prioritizes composability, reach, and usability over isolated numbers. It rewards developers who build interoperable systems, and it guides ecosystem architects to think about how their infrastructure connects, not just what it contains.

The shift from TVL to TVU is more than semantics. It’s a shift in values away from isolation, toward verifiable openness.

The Future We’re Building

At Pi Squared, we believe that the future of Web3 isn’t about choosing a chain. It’s about making all of them usable, composable, and provably secure together.

By focusing on TVU, and building the infrastructure to support it through the Verifiable Settlement Layer, we can move beyond liquidity islands and toward a truly interconnected blockchain ecosystem.

TVU isn’t just a metric. It’s a mission.

Let’s unlock what’s next together!