To Hit $1T TVL, Ethereum Must Play the Ace | HackerNoon

I didn’t walk into Ethereum from a pure software background. My world was hardware and algorithm design – working with folks like Erica Synths and SAF Tehnika, deep in signal processing for radio and music. And from those trenches, I learned one very sad, but very pure truth: you must protect your intellectual property. You never, never, never, never just show everyone how the secret sauce is made until it’s ancient history for your business.

It feels wrong, I get it. It’s painful. It’s ugly. It’s definitely sub-optimal for global progress on paper. But damn, it keeps you and the people trusting you alive. I still remember Girts Ozolins from Erica Synths hammering this point home back in 2019, showing me how company after company trying to build open-source embedded sound frameworks just… failed.

Fast forward a year, watching the blockchain space operate, and it hit me how right that wise man was. Because what are blockchain protocols doing? Exactly what he warned against.

1. It is Impossible to win by playing chess and telling opponent your next move.

It’s impossible. You just can’t win a serious game of chess if you tell your opponent your next five moves.

So, when someone like Justin Drake gets on stage at Devcon and lays out a roadmap stretching years into the future – say, a Beam Chain for 2029 – what do you think happens?

Everyone who wants a slice of Ethereum’s pie just pulls out their notepads and scribbles “Launch something similar in 2028.”

This whole game of front-running and MEV isn’t just happening inside the blocks. With all the core R&D happening out in the open, it’s baked into the very strategy of building and running these protocols as businesses.

2. Napkin Math: Fragmentation is Killing “The One”

Let’s do some quick napkin math. CoinGecko says the total blockchain market cap is cruising around $2.84 Trillion (as of when I first wrote this). That’s a lot of dollars. We’re actually getting close to giants like Apple.

But here’s the catch: it’s fragmented to hell and getting worse.

I’ll clip the list there, it’s enough to see the pattern. Maybe not perfectly scientific, but look: initial funding checks seem to get bigger for newer projects, while the relative slice of the pie (TVL compared to the potential) feels smaller or slower growing for the established giants. Why? Because as the rules of the blockchain game get clearer, investors are happier to write massive checks for new ecosystems if they have a viable plan to front-run the leader. All they need to do is watch Ethereum’s open development closely.

Let’s talk about that $1T Ethereum dream by 2029. If ETH somehow projects a 5x growth path, guess what? In a totally open-source world, everyone sees that path. Competitors analyze it, predict it, and it becomes crystal clear: there’s blood in the water. You can throw more and more money at biting off chunks of the market leader while he’s still trying to grow.

Any traditional software company would laugh at this. They announce when it’s done, and they sure as hell aren’t giving you the source code.

So, what’s the damage for Bitcoin and Ethereum? Maybe the slice each new project takes isn’t fatal on its own. Maybe the big guys can copy innovations later. But it takes time. And while they’re catching up, investor attention drifts, momentum stalls. Bitcoin arguably lost a huge chunk of opportunity (maybe 15%+) to Ethereum because it was slow to adapt. Ethereum is seeing the same pattern with newer chains.

Is it just about market share percentages? No! For the regular folks, our holy grail of “mass adoption,” this fragmentation screams one thing: the business of providing consensus doesn’t have consensus within itself!

That’s bearish!

If there was ONE chain, The One, consolidating the best tech, that would be a massive buy signal. My friends outside crypto? They’d dump their inflating fiat into it if they believed THIS was the one!

And this isn’t just office talk. We’re talking to farmers – the bedrock of the economy! They’re pissed off worldwide, looking for ways out, wanting independent markets. We’re already onboarding a project building an Indonesian Blockchain Coffee association! If the people producing food switch to crypto because they trust one stable system, the legacy financial world is toast.

But “The One” has to actually show up! And to land the truly massive deals – think Apple, Samsung, securing nation-level affairs on smart contracts – the TVL needs to be astronomical, way beyond $1T. Ethereum needs space to grow perhaps 20x just for the corporate sector. That requires insane security, meaning L1 transactions must be expensive, decentralized across jurisdictions, backed by huge value. A rollup-centric roadmap shouldn’t mean chaos; it needs architecture for the whole security/scalability spectrum.

Seeing the market today? Getting there looks like a collective task, but the current open-source free-for-all isn’t helping us consolidate. The demand is there. The supply is fractured.

3. Time for Open Source Idealists to Grow Up

Okay, let’s get real. All this amazing research, code, and brainpower pouring into Ethereum and blockchain – it belongs to the community, right? This collective knowledge dataset is built by countless hours of work.

And today? It’s wide open! I can stroll through Ethereum Magicians forum, or Eth Research, watch Core Dev calls, even peek at Nethermind Forta Agents, gaining security related insights! It’s an incredible resource.

I gain this incredibly valuable data for almost nothing. And the more compute power I have to process it, the bigger advantage I have to beat these OSS projects at their own game if my interests differ.

Sure, one could argue everyone benefits, speeding up progress overall. But here’s the kickback: Is everyone sharing back equally? Wouldn’t progress be even faster if the capable players were incentivized to chip back into the same knowledge pool instead of just running off to build their own competing thing?

Let’s look at Big Corps. Are they using this dataset? You bet. Are they contributing back equally, intellectually or financially? Much less likely. It’s not about good or bad; it’s the nature of their business. They know the IP rules: never show your hand. They love that blockchain R&D is open for them to use, but they have zero incentive to reciprocate at the same level.

Example: JP Morgan launched Kinexys Liiink. Did they leverage Ethereum’s R&D? Almost certainly. How much did they publish back to the open-source community?

Let’s try to break it down; They have their whitepaper published: https://www.jpmorgan.com/kinexys/documents/JPMC-Kinexys-Project-Epic-Whitepaper-2024.pdf

Valuable contribution back? Minimal, if any. It’s a high-level business doc for their stakeholders, using concepts likely derived from open research to build their closed system. It’s not for the Ethereum OSS community.

Interestingly, they reference ZAMA ZAMA, who uses BSD3-clear dual licensing model. You want to use their IP commercially? You pay. They get your skin in the game.

Does JPMorgan pay ZAMA? Likely required by the license.

Does JPMorgan pay the authors of EIP-5564 (published CC0, an Ethereum Improvement Proposal)? Probably not directly.

So, from the outset:

Does JPMorgan pays ZAMA based on licensing requirements? Sure thing they do!

Does JPMorgan pays EIP-5564 Authors / Ecosystem? Likely not – it’s CC0!

What does this mean? EIP-5564 ends up improving a closed JPMorgan system. If you don’t charge for your intellectual work in a market economy, you don’t eat. If you can’t feed your brain, the brilliant work stops. Unless those EIP authors played some 4D chess gambit (doubtful, but I’d love to be wrong!), Big Corp likely pockets the profits from that research and might eventually even “own” the researchers through grant funding because the IP wasn’t protected upfront. We see the pressure – EF’s treasury shrinking while everyone at summits talks crypto tech.

Financial institutions can attract TVL easily. They won’t need to contribute back significantly. Result? The potential security and growth of Ethereum (or any OSS system) slows down compared to what could be achieved collectively.

The only sustainable path for OSS R&D that doesn’t end with you working for the castle you tried to replace is getting everyone’s skin in the game. Not just staking. Business-level skin. “Either you contribute meaningfully, or you pay for deep R&D access.” You have to make institutions commit.

Anything else is naive. Maybe it works for non-financial OSS like Red Hat, but those projects aren’t aiming for trillion-dollar capitalization. If they were, Big Corp would build it themselves, closed-source, and call it “Mac OS” and “Windows”..

Even today, “fully open source” is a bit of a myth, right? We have private keys, certificates, ceremonies, data obfuscation… Heck, try finding the link to the next public Ethereum Core Dev call easily. It’s public, but obscured. The understanding that full openness has limits is already there; the clarity on what to do about it is missing.

4. Getting More Skin in the Game: It’s Good For Everyone!

Imagine if accessing that deep R&D data – the stuff referenced in papers, the cutting-edge discussions – required a provable, equal level of contribution. (Let’s ignore how for a second).

What happens? JPMorgan either has to hire, nurture, and pay for their own Vitalik-level researcher contributing openly at that level, OR they pay significantly for access to the collective dataset.

Either way, Ethereum wins. Either valuable fiat flows into the ecosystem (funding more EIPs, core dev), or valuable knowledge flows into the Ethereum-owned dataset. Data = Money.

I’m not saying Ethereum should become IBM. I’m saying OSS protocol development needs to stay decentralized and open to contributors, but become competitive enough to survive. We need the best of both worlds: no NDAs for every little commit, but assurance that accessing the deep knowledge pool means you have a measurable, corresponding positive impact.

That’s the mission at Peeramid Labs: building stakes & profit-based gateways for data markets. I believe this is Priority One for any foundational OSS model today. Forget everything else until this is solved.

Think of factory doors unlocking for employees only when their competence (contribution) hits a certain level. A true knowledge market.

We need to create knowledge marketplaces where R&D time and resources are accounted for, measured, and maybe even issued as cryptographic attestations (tokens, NFTs, whatever). This isn’t sci-fi; it’s adapting proven concepts like proprietary licensing and NDAs using smart contracts.

These markets need cryptographic proofs:

• Bearer verifiably possesses specific knowledge/contribution level.

• Transferring an asset guarantees access.

• Proofs about dataset properties (overlap, quality) without revealing data (ZK, FHE, TEEs are heading this way).

• (In quantum future) Proofs against tampering.

We’re already using SNARKs in Rankify-it, to prove data integrity for proposals/votes based on commitments.

How do we build this hierarchical access? We want contributors to enter, learn, and grow, just like today, but provably. As they contribute and gain peer recognition (competence = time + energy + peer validation), they unlock deeper levels. Like university – you don’t get 5th-year material on day one. It requires commitment.

The Power of Earned Knowledge and “The One”

If you enter an ecosystem like this, you’re an apprentice, a first-year student. No one hands you the keys to the kingdom or the most sacred texts on day one.

You have to grow. Contribute, discuss, try, fail, succeed, build relationships, create value recognized by your peers.

This process inherently puts skin in the game.

If you spent years earning access to a certain knowledge level, you won’t just give it away cheaply! If a big corp pays a fortune for access, they might walk away with that data slice, but they miss the next chapter, and their investment stays with the ecosystem.

Suddenly, even Big Corp is incentivized to support the same space, the same project, the same TVL.

This is how we design the snowball effect. This is how we get our “The One”!

It makes sense all-around, same as in university – there is no point to put all of 5 years end-studies upfront of student in first year, it just

Okay, so if we need structure and skin in the game, why not just pile onto Bitcoin? Its TVL is massive, Satoshi already designed PoW as a kind of knowledge work marketplace (finding hashes).

But here’s Ethereum’s ace in the hand: Community. Bitcoin is great, but its community is arguably smaller, less dynamic development-wise. In the semi-open source world I’m describing, a vibrant, adaptable, trusted community becomes even more critical.

Word of Mouth is the New Open Source Trust

Restricting some data access can’t mean killing trust. People can’t start doubting Ethereum like they doubt Meta’s data policies just because not every single thing is instantly public.

How do we solve this in the semi-open model? Word of mouth.

Look, I don’t personally verify every cryptographic detail in Vitalik’s papers. I don’t audit the MPC kit SDK from Silence Laboratories myself. I trust that Vitalik is top-notch, with high-quality peer review. I trust that Trail of Bits does a good job auditing Silence Laboratories.

My personal intersection might be closer to smart contracts, maybe reviewing an EIP like 7702 and finding there a bug or two.

Similarly, my users and friends might not grasp the deep tech of Peeramid Labs, but they trust us, and they can sanity-check the high-level architecture. That’s enough.

You don’t need fully open everything to build a massively adopted protocol. But you do need a large, committed, layered community that can downstream knowledge trust based on earned reputation and contribution and upstream talented contributors!

That’s the path forward. Let’s build it.