Recently, I've been pondering a question repeatedly: What exactly has Web3 revived?

Digital assets, identity verification, on-chain governance — we've heard these words enough times. But upon closer reflection, it seems Web3 has overlooked humanity's most primitive and valuable thing: relationships themselves.

Relationships generate trust, trust reduces cooperation costs, and cooperation creates value. This logic works rapidly in the real world, but breaks when moved onto the blockchain. We have wallet addresses, but no relationship networks. There are various tokens, but a lack of trust accumulation. We have voting rights, but our collaboration history is a mess.

It wasn't until I saw what Walrus is doing that I realized — someone is seriously working to change this situation. They are trying to turn relationships themselves into programmable, transferable capital.

Traditional finance has tokenized everything — houses, cash flows, voting rights — all sorted out. But relationships, that thing, remain invisible, vague, and untransferable. The irony is clear: the most valuable collaboration networks can't be measured by any financial instrument. Walrus is filling this gap.

Don't think of WAL as a "social token" — that's just packaging personal influence for sale. WAL focuses on something else: how the value between relationships flows.

A helps B with verification, B and C complete a project together, C provides a key solution in D's task. These interactions are just history in traditional models — forgettable and unusable. But in the Walrus system, every interaction is recorded, can be accumulated, verified, and truly influence subsequent trust decisions.

This assetization of relationships is supported by three pillars:

First is verifiable interaction history. Not based on self-introductions or recommendation letters, but on on-chain, verifiable records of cooperation.

Second is dynamic credit scoring. It’s not static; it evolves as you collaborate across different scenarios and with different people.

Third is composable economic incentives. What can you do with your relationship assets? Participate in new projects, gain easier access to financing, or even directly monetize — these application scenarios will grow increasingly numerous.

This logic is highly significant for the Web3 ecosystem. Many current DeFi, DAO, and NFT communities fail because of poor collaboration and information asymmetry. If relationships themselves can be quantified, tracked, and traded, then vertical domain collaborations could operate as efficiently as financial markets.

Developer communities, creative networks, entrepreneurial ecosystems — aren’t they all built on relationships? Once these relationships acquire financial attributes, the entire Web3 productivity could leap by an order of magnitude.

Of course, it’s still early to say all this. Walrus is in the early exploration stage, figuring out how to prevent relationship data from being misused, how to balance privacy and transparency — these issues are not fully resolved yet. But the direction is right; the rest is a matter of technology and time.

What I am optimistic about is that some projects dare to break the mold. They are not just repeating the DeFi playbook but asking — what else can Web3 do that humans truly need? The question of relationship capitalization is a good answer.