As the world builds walls, Web3 builds tunnels

Globalisation is retreating. But it’s not dead. It moved underground.

In the age of globalisation, the world moved like an elephant — vast, centralised, powerful.

Slow to change, but dominant in scale.
Trade agreements were its trunk, multinationals its legs, capital its heartbeat.

But elephants don’t dig.
They trample, bulldoze, reroute.
And now, as old systems begin to stumble under their own weight, something smaller but smarter is burrowing beneath them.

Web3 is becoming the ant colony beneath the elephant.
Agile, decentralised, and hard to kill.

For non-members, you can read the full story here.

The elephant stumbles

The elephant of globalisation once marched with confidence.

• Factories crossed oceans.
• Dollars ruled supply chains.
• Borders softened in favour of speed and scale.

But now?
The elephant is limping.

• The US-China tariff war is back.
• Europe builds its digital walls.
• India tightens local control.
• China doubles down on state power.

The model of global trade, built on decades of treaties and trust is fracturing.

Supply chains are being redrawn not by engineers, but by politicians.

And in doing so, the elephant is crushing the very earth it once marched across.

Ants tunnel under walls

But while the elephant stumbles, the ants get to work.

Web3 isn’t grand or elegant. It doesn’t operate through conferences or summits.

It operates through tunnels.

• A DAO in Lagos pays a contributor in Lisbon.
• A developer in Hanoi launches a DeFi tool used by traders in Rio.
• An artist in Manila mints an NFT collected by a wallet in Berlin.

There are no borders here.
No customs.
No permission slips.

Just small, efficient, unstoppable interactions.

Evolution underground

While nation-states escalate tariff wars and redraw trade maps, Web3 continues to grow in directions they can’t contain.

• In DeFi, protocols evolve beyond borders. They don’t rely on intermediaries, nor do they need shipping lanes or customs clearance. Liquidity flows peer-to-peer, unaffected by sanctions or trade blocs.
• New blockchain architectures like modular chains and restaking networks aren’t housed in any one jurisdiction. Their design lets them function across fragmented systems without needing permission to interact.
• Zero-knowledge proofs aren’t just about privacy — they enable identity, computation, and trust to scale without relying on third-party certifiers or regulatory approvals.
• AI models are increasingly deployed on decentralised compute networks, trained by global communities, and accessed through tokenised incentives — a new supply chain of intelligence that’s untaxed, untariffed, and unbordered.

These aren’t just technical improvements, they’re structural advantages in a world where traditional globalisation is gridlocked.

While states negotiate trade at summits, open protocols continue transacting, verifying, and building at the speed of block time.

Bitcoin: The neutral tunnel

In this global unravelling, one creature stands out from the swarm:

Bitcoin.

No country owns it. No company controls it.
It belongs to everyone and to no one.

In a fractured world, Bitcoin may be the only truly neutral currency.
Its settlement layer doesn’t care if you’re American, Russian, or Zimbabwean.
It doesn’t obey sanctions. It doesn’t recognise flags.

It is a tunnel in its purest form — a quiet, cold, resilient burrow beneath the geopolitical storm.

And in an era where the USD is no longer seen as neutral, that matters more than ever.

The silk road beneath the soil

The original Silk Road was trampled by elephants — armies, empires, and economies.

But the new Silk Road is built by ants:

• From fiat rails to wallet networks
• From compliance gates to composable code
• From national currencies to borderless tokens

Globalisation didn’t die.
It simply went underground.

It went peer-to-peer.
It became protocol.

Closing thoughtThey raised the tariffs. Closed the ports. Redrew the maps.
And the ants quietly tunneled underneath.

Web3 doesn’t need to conquer the surface.
It doesn’t need to move fast or break everything.
It just needs to keep digging.

The elephant is loud. But the ants are everywhere.
And by the time the old world notices, the new one will already be built beneath it.

References:

CoinCub: https://coincub.com/ranking/the-global-web3-index-2024/

CoinDesk: https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2025/03/31/why-emerging-economies-need-strategic-crypto-reserves

RSM: https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-new-mercantilism.html

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/03/could-web3-change-the-game-in-the-coming-tariff-wars/

As the world builds walls, Web3 builds tunnels was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.