I’ve spent so much time in the crypto market that I’ve gradually come to a painfully clear truth: there is no such thing as the time value of money here.

Compared to traditional finance, where time is the core resource—money sitting idle for a day incurs a day's opportunity cost, and a year’s worth of compound interest makes sense—in the blockchain space, it’s completely different. Lock your funds in a wallet with no growth mechanism; put them into a protocol with yields that fluctuate arbitrarily; throw them into a strategy with risk that’s impossible to price. There’s almost nothing on-chain that can assign a price to time itself.

It wasn’t until I studied Lorenzo’s architecture that I understood what this protocol is doing—it’s essentially transplanting the most core concept of traditional finance onto the blockchain: the time value of capital. OTF’s yield system isn’t about short-term gain, emotional pumping, or hype; it’s a traceable, decomposable, cyclical structured return. For the first time on-chain, we see a financial logic where “time = price.”

To be brutally honest, most on-chain activity isn’t investing at all—it’s gambling.

Gambling focuses on the outcome, right or wrong, wins or losses in an instant. Investing focuses on time, process, and compound growth. They are completely different worlds.

The core of traditional finance isn’t actually the yield numbers; it’s how time is priced. Why do bonds have a price? Because of time. Why does the yield curve exist? Because of time. Corporate financing costs, bank profits, economic growth—all ultimately influenced by the power of compound interest over time.

From another perspective, time is the pillar of finance.

But on-chain finance? It doesn’t have a pillar at all.