You've probably experienced something like this:
You buy a coffee at an independent coffee shop on a work trip and get offered a stamp on their "buy 10 get 1 loyalty card". You turn it down since it's only good at that cafe and you're going home tomorrow.
Or you subscribe to a service, perhaps for AI, where your unused credits vanish when they reset each month.
This pattern of siloed value is everywhere.
Value gets created inside a company or network but can't easily move out to where you might actually use it. Sometimes, the only escape hatch is converting to national currency, and even when available, that path can be quite expensive.
But what if your corner coffee shop was able to compete with big corporate chains by participating in a larger indie cafe loyalty program? And that program could bridge to similar programs in other cities, or even countries?
Or at the end of your monthly cycle, you could make your AI credits available for others to use, and could "store credit" to use others' surplus AI credits?
To be clear, each of these would likely require additional functionalty to be built (like the other parts of a coffee loyalty app) -- but with the latest release, Unyt Bridging can help span silos of value across peer accounting systems and enable exchange between different networks.
Unyt Bridging Spans Value Across Silos
Picture several different communities each running their own Unyt Application: a peer-to-peer app that enables economic interactions across that community with their own accounting, smart agreements, and payments.
Within each network, people can enter into agreements, bill, pay, and get paid. But that capacity hits a limit when wanting to interact with someone from a different network.
Using a Unyt bridge two of these Unyt Networks connect so value can flow between them without converting to dollars first. In essence, they are able to form an ecosystem.
But this isn't a merger. It's a bridge. Each network keeps its autonomy. Communities maintain control over their own governance and accounting while gaining the ability to exchange value with other networks.
A loyalty network of independent coffee shops in New York might set up a bridge with another in Los Angeles, and another with a cafe community in London.
Real Projects, Real Connections
We've been talking with some other projects about what this enables. Using a couple of infrastructure projects as an example:
The HoloFuel Unyt Network might provide the currency infrastructure for Holo Hosting services.
The Spore Unyt Network might provide the currency infrastructure for Mycelium's distributed network services like VPNs or CDNs.
These projects have built complementary software and infrastructure. By bridging their value networks, they can reduce costs and create competitive advantages that neither could achieve alone — similar to how small retailers form buying cooperatives to negotiate better terms with suppliers, or how regional banks share ATM networks to match the reach of national chains.
Bridging can let them connect their value networks directly — a hosting provider on Holo Hosting can purchase networking services directly from Spore without having to go through any external currency, trading pairs on exchanges, or deal with extra fees or delays.
What This Means for Crypto
For those in the crypto space, the problem is especially visible.
Moving value between projects means navigating trading pairs: Token A → ETH → USDT → Token B. Each hop requires finding a trading pair with an adequate liquidity pool, paying gas and conversion fees, then waiting for conversions to clear at each step. Many projects have substantial treasuries but weak liquidity paths to each other.
Bridging offers a different approach: direct value exchange between projects and their community members without the awkward hopping across trading pair chains. The result is increased utility for token holders without changing supply dynamics. No token mergers, no supply inflation — just more customers for your community's services and more places your currency can be spent.
It's bonus utility, not supply manipulation. A win for everyone.
This Release: The Foundation
This release enables bridging between multiple Unyt Networks: separate communities each running their own version of Unyt. Try out bridging between the two Unyt apps available in the Unyt v0.50 repository. The Holo Hosting App version is configured to demonstrate what a Holo Hosting Unyt app might look like and the Infrastructure Marketplace App version is configured to demonstrate trading between monetary currencies from multiple external currencies.
Soon: Bridging between Unyt and Blockchain
In an upcoming release, Unyt will support bridging directly to blockchain networks — making these same dynamics available for on-chain assets. But the pattern will be the same - create a bridge, and then value can traverse between the two sides, subject to the rules put in place.
A Question Worth Exploring
Given this bridging capacity, how might marketplaces of connected projects emerge organically and what impact might that have?
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