Blockchain technology has evolved through pivotal innovations in economic design, each solving fundamental limitations while creating new possibilities. Boundless introduces Proof of Verifiable Work (PoVW), fundamentally reimagining how blockchain economies function through verifiable computation markets.

Why Previous Economic Models Reach Their Limits

Proof of Work

created decentralized consensus through economic competition but at tremendous cost. Bitcoin miners spend billions on specialized hardware and electricity to produce hashes that serve no other purpose beyond network security. This artificial scarcity model worked initially, but revealed critical limitations:

• massive energy requirements,
• concentrated mining power due to the need of specialized hardware,
• and zero correlation between work performed and computational utility.

Proof of Stake

addressed energy consumption by replacing computational competition with economic based sybil resistance. Yet this efficiency brought new economic problems:

• wealth concentration through staking requirements,
• cost of capital for security that is ultimately ****being pushed onto participants of the network,
• and the persistent limitation that every node must redundantly re-execute every transaction.

The result? Blockchains with computational capacity is most like a Raspberry Pi’s despite billion-dollar valuations.

Engineering Economic Evolution Through PoVW

Boundless's Proof of Verifiable Work, a metering and reward mechanism, represents a fundamental economic breakthrough that transforms blockchain incentive structures through several key innovations:

1. Creating Permissionless Markets for Verifiable Computation

Unlike PoW and PoS which artificially constrain throughput through block sizes and gas limits, Boundless establishes genuine markets for verifiable computation. Through PoVW, verifiable computation becomes a tradable commodity that scales naturally with demand, eliminating the artificial constraints plaguing existing blockchains.

This market-driven approach creates price discovery for computational resources while maintaining cryptographic guarantees.

2. Democratizing Economic Participation

While Bitcoin mining demands specialized ASICs and PoS requires significant capital stakes, Boundless's PoVW enables standard computing hardware to participate meaningfully.