Can this bootstrap a brand-new chain with no DeFi TVL?

A new chain is a different problem from a new vault. On an established chain the capital is already present and you are competing for it. On a new one it has to arrive first, which makes the bottleneck logistics rather than APY: users need a bridge route they trust, gas on a chain they have never used, and some reason to believe the destination will still be there next month.

That changes the shape of the campaign. Bridge guidance stops being a footnote and becomes part of the work — in the TopNod case the practical constraint was which bridge could route to Pharos at all. Expect the first cohort to absorb a larger share of the budget, because they take the most risk with the least evidence. And expect the resulting pool to be a large fraction of the chain's entire DeFi TVL, which is itself a fact worth publishing while it is true.