Back in May 2014 I'd just moved to the Cayman Islands, and I figured the best way to christen the place was to get twenty five GMI members to fly out to Grand Cayman for what turned out to be the first of our Round Tables. It was two days of the biggest ideas anyone in the room had. We talked about China devaluing, about the coming El Niño, and we listened to a guy who'd built a gold storage business which he described, quite proudly, as designed by a paranoid macro investor for other paranoid macro investors. It was a very good weekend.
Then a group of long-standing members who'd backed a small Bitcoin exchange in Singapore stood up, and by the time they sat down again they had completely and utterly blown the mind of every person in that room, mine included. I walked out of it convinced that what I'd just heard was the single biggest tech development since the invention of the internet, and I said so in print.
I'd expected a pitch about payments or digital gold, and instead they explained what the essence of what a blockchain is once you strip the currency away, which is a ledger. A ledger of anything you choose to write on it, kept by nobody and alterable by nobody. I remember sitting there doing the mental arithmetic on what that meant, and when I got back to my desk I wrote this to my subscribers:
"Once you realise that ANYTHING can be recorded as long as it is attached to a bitcoin then you have a time-stamped, decentralised proof of ownership of EVERYTHING. Imagine a world where every single insurance contract, derivative contract, housing deal, property ownership contract, proof of purchase etc., can be stored in a decentralised manner. Bitcoin can tag, record and verify the ownership of every stock, bond and security along with every derivative contract."
I called it the world's ownership ledger, and I said it would replace what I described at the time as the murky, undercapitalised, rehypothecating cesspool of a custody system at the rotting heart of finance, which I felt qualified to say because I'd spent my whole career inside that system and knew exactly how broken it was. It felt enormous and it felt new, and I signed the piece off with a line I quoted back to people many times over the following years. "Bitcoin. I get it. Do you?"
Twelve years on, the thesis has a shorter name: Everything will be a token.
Right idea, wrong chain
Look, we had the idea right even if the chain was wrong. It didn't happen on Bitcoin, which turned out to be very good at one thing (money that nobody can debase, and has stayed in that lane ever since.) The ledger-of-everything idea migrated to chains built for programmable contracts, where a token could carry logic as well as ownership, and that's where the rest of this story happens.
But then, for years, not a great deal happened.
The exciting things on my 2014 list went nowhere, because nobody tokenised the housing market, insurance contracts stayed in their filing cabinets, and the handful of property tokens that did launch mostly just sat there.
What moved first was the thing nobody had bothered to get excited about, which was the dollar. A plain digital dollar on a chain, redeemable one for one, that anyone on earth could hold and send at any hour for a fraction of a cent. There are around $300bn of them onchain as I write.
After dollars came the next simplest thing, the Treasury bill. And that's where the story stops being a crypto story.
Where we are now
Tokenised US Treasury funds are at about $14.8bn as of September 20th, and look at who's issuing them: BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, Fidelity, Invesco, WisdomTree, State Street and VanEck.
Stocks followed. In June 2025 Robinhood and Kraken both launched tokenised US equities trading around the clock five days a week, and Robinhood let European customers hold tokens tracking private companies, SpaceX and OpenAI among them. Nine months later the regulators caught up with the market. In March the SEC approved Nasdaq's rules to let securities trade in tokenised form, with the Depository Trust Company minting the tokens, and the NYSE's own rules were approved a month later. Nasdaq plans to run a 23-hour trading day from December 6th. Stripe has incubated its own blockchain, Tempo, built for stablecoin settlement, with Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Klarna and UBS among its partners.
This is the real world asset wave, and it deserves the excitement. Think about what it means for finance. Markets that never close. Settlement in seconds instead of days. Assets that carry their own rules, so a bond can pay its own coupon and a fund can rebalance itself. A twenty year old in India who has never had a route to buying Apple can now own a piece of it from a phone. Every company gets access to every saver on earth, and every saver gets access to the world's best companies. For a country with a lot of debt to service (which is most of them) that's strategy.
And it's early. That $14.8bn of tokenised Treasuries sits against $31trn of Treasuries outstanding, less than a twentieth of one percent. Everything that isn't a stablecoin adds up to a little over $30bn. The biggest balance sheets in the world have decided this is where the financial system is headed, and they've moved a rounding error so far.
You're thinking too small...
But most people's imagination stops at markets. Faster settlement, longer hours, cheaper access. Tokenisation as an upgrade to the plumbing of finance. That's how the industry uses the word, and it's why the whole thing is filed under real world assets, as if the interesting question is which existing assets get wrapped next.
That thinking is far too small. Trading Apple on a Sunday is a nice thing to be able to do, but it isn't what a ledger of everything is for.
What a token actually is
Go back to what I saw in Cayman. A blockchain records anything, so the question that matters is what the 'anything' is, and that means asking what a token really is.
A token is a piece of information that a machine can read, verify, price and trade, without asking a human. It happens to be a good container for a dollar or a share, which is why dollars and shares went first. But it's a container, and the container doesn't care what's inside it.
For all of human history we've quantified value in a narrow set of things. Money, and the claims on future money we call securities. That's what our system was built to record and trade, because that's what humans value in a form other humans can measure. So when a new ledger showed up, we put money and securities on it. Of course we did.
We are now building an economy whose most active participants are not human. This is the core of my Exponential Age framework, which I've written about here before and which my upcoming book (out Nov 3rd and available to preorder now) The world's financial system has a human interface, and the new participants aren't human. Within five years I expect agents to double the number of users of the internet, of crypto and of AI itself. Billions of new inhabitants, arriving all at once, and none of them able to use anything we've built.
An agent doesn't value money and securities the way you do. What an agent needs is information: who you are, whether you're allowed to do this, what it costs right now, who owns that, whether this is true. In a machine economy, information is the value, and money is just one type of information among thousands.
Everything means everything
Start with identity, because everything else depends on it. Every human and every agent in this economy needs a credential a machine can check. For humans, the first problem is proving you're one. An AI can now browse, buy, swipe and sign, and every business built on the assumption that a click is a person is finding out that assumption is gone. The answer is a proof of human credential you hold as a token, built on zero knowledge proofs, which let you prove something about yourself without revealing the thing itself. So you can prove you're over eighteen without disclosing your birthday, or that you passed KYC without handing over your passport again. It's already in mainstream products. World, whose team I had on my podcast last summer, had verified around 18 million humans by this spring, with integrations in Zoom, DocuSign and Tinder.
Agents need the same thing from the other side. Every agent has to prove who is doing the economic action, for whom, and with what authority. Multiply that by billions of agents making thousands of calls an hour and think about the scale of the identity layer alone. Identity is the key that unlocks everything after it, and it's one of the least discussed markets I know of.
Then contracts, which is the 2014 list, finally arriving. A ticket is a contract between you and a venue. A reservation is a contract with a hotel. An insurance policy, a warranty, a car's service history, a permission to enter a building or read a file. Each one is a promise attached to an identity, and a token is a promise attached to an identity that a machine can check in a millisecond. Property lands here too, eventually, once every registry on earth agrees what a deed is.
Then attention, and this is where it stops being about finance at all. In a world where machines can generate infinite content, human attention is the one thing that stays scarce, which means it's the one thing that stays valuable. Today you rent your audience from a platform that sets the terms and takes the economics. A token lets a creator, a musician, a community, own the network they've built instead of leasing it. And it goes further than creators. What you watch, what you know, the data your body produces, every form of human attention can be a token you own and get paid for. People have done the maths on sharing ad revenue with users and concluded it's small. That undersizes it badly, because it's measuring human attention in the units of the old economy. In the new one, it's one of the answers to what people do for income when machines do the work.
Then the raw inputs of the machine economy itself. Every agent consumes energy, compute and data. Energy feeds compute. Compute produces information and attention. Information and attention get refined into intelligence. Each layer needs the one beneath it and each is worth more per unit as you go up. As agents multiply, every layer gets tokenised so machines can buy and sell it from each other at machine speed. A kilowatt-hour becomes a token. A second of GPU time becomes a token. A dataset becomes a token, which is the newest market of all, because until now there was no buyer.
And this is where I'd ask you to notice something. You already live in a tokenised economy. It's just a centralised one. Salesforce is a token factory: it refines vast amounts of proprietary data into information it sells back to you. Alphabet and Meta are token factories and marketplaces for attention. ICE, the world's largest exchange group, is a token exchange that also sells the data about the tokens it trades. Those businesses are worth trillions because they own both the factory and the market, and you own neither. What changes now is that the factories and the markets go open, on rails nobody owns, and the tokens can be held by anyone, including the people whose data and attention produced them.
This is what the exponential age actually is. Every piece of information in the world, about every thing and every person, becoming a unit that can be owned, priced and exchanged. The ledger of everything I saw in 2014 wasn't a ledger for humans to keep better records. It was the operating system for an economy that hadn't been born yet. If you want to pull on any one of these threads, identity, attention, the compute market, that's exactly what I built raoulpal.ai for. It's trained on everything I've written, including the book, and it'll argue back and help you wrap your head around these concepts.
The measuring stick melts
Put all of that together and you arrive somewhere the finance version of this story never goes.
We're about to have an economy in which billions of non human participants are creating, trading and consuming value at machine speed, in units that were never designed to be counted by humans. Most of that activity will happen in a layer we can't directly see. When an agent buys a second of compute from another agent to verify a credential so a third agent can settle a contract, no human was paid, no product was shipped, and nothing showed up in a wage or a receipt. Yet value was created, priced and exchanged, and the ledger recorded all of it.
Pretty soon the whole apparatus we built over thousands of years to score a human economy of scarcity stops describing reality, because the economy it's pointed at has become a shrinking fraction of the one that exists. This is what I call the Economic Singularity: the moment the economy accelerates past the point where human centric measurement can follow it. The instruments break because the machine is running faster than the dials go.
That's the part that sounds frightening, but a system built for scarcity breaking is also the precondition for the system that replaces it. When information itself becomes the most valuable thing in the economy, and every piece of it becomes a token that can be owned, that's a new kind of wealth being created out of things that were never assets before. Your attention. Your identity. Your data. The compute you can spare and the energy you can generate. For the first time, the raw material of the economy is something ordinary people produce simply by existing, and there is now a way to own it and be paid for it rather than have a platform harvest it. The people who understand that early will hold a position in the new economy that doesn't map onto anything in the old one.
And we have barely started imagining it. In 2014 we sat in a room and thought putting property deeds on a ledger was the exciting part. The interesting businesses of the next decade will be built on things nobody in that room had a word for, in markets that don't exist yet, priced in units we haven't invented. The whole economy is going to be rebuilt from the ledger up, and with it the way we value, and price, and account for life itself...
This is where the Everything Code leads. The book charts the whole journey: the demographic trap we're in, why debt and debasement follow from it, why the exponential technologies are the only way out, and why the Economic Singularity at the end of it is something to be optimistic about rather than afraid of.
The Everything Code is out on November 3rd and available to preorder now.
