On November 8, 2025, the “Pop Chain Global Ecosystem Summit & Luma Protocol Launch Ceremony,” co-hosted by PopChain and Luma Protocol, was grandly held in Hong Kong. The conference brought together global leaders from blockchain, AI infrastructure, digital finance, and the wider Web3 economy, centering on one core theme — the arrival of the Compute-Finance era. During the event, Ben, Vice Dean of the Luma Academy, delivered the keynote speech titled “Compute is the New Yield,” formally announcing to the global ecosystem that Luma is redefining the fundamental logic of DeFi by transforming compute power from a cost center into a verifiable, priceable, tradable, and compounding financial asset — laying a new value foundation for the deep convergence of AI and Web3.

In his speech, Ben emphasized that over the past five years, “liquidity” has been the central competitive driver of DeFi. Yet with the exponential acceleration of AI, compute power has become the world’s scarcest and most structurally growing resource. Its importance is rapidly overtaking liquidity, positioning compute as the new value anchor for the next financial cycle. At this critical turning point, however, the global market still lacks a unified framework capable of standardizing, financializing, and tokenizing compute. Luma’s arrival, Ben said, is not a minor technical upgrade but a restructuring of the economic base layer. By recording compute contributions on-chain and converting computation into yield through transparent and verifiable mechanisms, Luma is establishing the world’s first sustainable Compute-Fi standard system.

As the first protocol globally dedicated to compute-based financialization, Luma’s mission is simple yet transformative — to turn compute into an asset and computation into yield. Unlike traditional liquidity-mining models, Luma introduces compute-contribution mining, compute-yield financialization, and multi-ecosystem value circulation. It enables everyday users to generate real returns through compute participation, while giving AI training, inference, and on-chain computation clear financial attributes. Ben highlighted: “Compute will be the new Liquidity, and Luma will be the new Engine.” This shift signals the beginning of the Compute-Fi era and will fundamentally reshape the structures of Web3, AI, and the global digital asset market over the coming decade.

Within the broader ecosystem, Luma functions not as an isolated protocol but as the “financial engine layer” of the PopChain economy. On PopChain, Luma enables compute ownership and on-chain assetization; within the Nivex trading ecosystem, compute yield gains pricing, liquidity, and market flow; through PopX Fund, compute assets receive capital acceleration and compounding growth; and across applications such as PenFolds, Probly, and Pop Game, Luma’s data and yields feed back into the PopChain economic model, driving the ecosystem’s flywheel. Together, these interactions form a closed loop of Compute → Liquidity → Yield → Trust, making PopChain a sovereign chain with fully integrated energy, financial, and application layers. In Ben’s words: if PopChain is the body, then Luma is undoubtedly its economic heart.

Importantly, Luma’s progress has already moved well beyond narrative. The Luma mainnet test environment has demonstrated stable performance with yields exceeding those of traditional DeFi products; the protocol has passed full security audits by CertiK; partnerships with multiple AI infrastructure and GPU networks have been established, supplying real compute resources to Luma’s financial model; and the governance community now spans more than 20 countries, forming a global contributor network. These developments signal that Compute-Fi is no longer a concept but an emerging global trend.

Ben concluded his keynote by stating: “The past decade was defined by capital driving financial growth. The next decade will be defined by compute driving capital growth. Luma is not just a protocol — it is a reconstruction of value, energy, and trust. As AI and Web3 converge globally, compute will become the new benchmark for financial value, and Luma will stand at the starting point of the global compute economy.”

With the official debut of Luma Protocol, the PopChain ecosystem now stands on six strategic pillars — sovereign L1 infrastructure, compute finance, decentralized trading, entertainment applications, social content, and capital systems. This summit marks both the launch of Luma’s Compute-Fi standard and the beginning of a new phase of global, energy-driven expansion for the PopChain ConnectFi ecosystem. Looking forward, Luma will continue advancing compute ownership, financialization, and global liquidity, transforming computation into the foundational value source of the next financial era.