However, not many people talk about tokenization.
This video on the Great Taking by David Rogers Webb is a must watch:
- https://odysee.com/@EarthNewspaper:e/The-Great-Taking-by-David-Rodgers-Webb:3
Tokenization is very similar to CBDCs and stablecoins.
You can treat tokenization as: turning everything important into machine-readable, permissioned, and programmable state.
It's not about "democratizing finance". From the Controllers' perspective tokenization is:
- "Put all economically and politically relevant claims into a standardized, queryable, enforceable substrate that my AI and rules engines can see and control in real time."
That means:
- Every claim (cash, bond, equity, fund share, real estate interest, invoice, carbon credit, benefit entitlement, even identity attribute)
Has:
- a unique ID
- a traceable history
- an attached policy envelope (who can hold it, where, when, under what rules)
- and lives on a ledger that some small set of institutions can gate, pause, or rewrite under color of law.
Once that's true, everything else (UX, DeFi theater, "24/7 markets") is just skin.
If you wanted the option of a Great Taking (even as a tail):
- You'd want everything that matters dematerialized, held by intermediaries, and expressed as tokens on systems controlled by a small institutional set.
You'd want clear legal language that:
- distinguishes between beneficial and legal ownership, and
- puts token-holders behind secured creditors and CCPs (central counterparties).
You'd want resolution / bail-in logic encoded in contracts and, over time, in token standards.
Tokenization = the technical implementation layer that makes a Great Taking operationally feasible in days, not years.
Even if they never push the red button, the option value is enormous from a Controller perspective.
You can think of tokenization as:
- State capacity up, latency down. They can see more, faster, and push changes directly through code.
- Expropriation gets smoother. Instead of chaotic bank runs and court fights, you get parameter changes on tokens.
- Going off-grid gets harder. You don't just opt out of banks; you opt out of the graph where ownership lives.
- Plausible deniability increases. They can say "the smart contract did it" or "it's in the prospectus" instead of "we ordered a seizure".
Tokenization is basically the bridge that makes a "Great Taking" technically trivial if they ever need it. Whether they press that button is a separate probability question — but the incentives to build the option are very clear.
If you look into Ethereum, it is evolving into the programmable sandbox for dollar/compliance rails:
- Governance testbed for next-gen money/IDs
- Volatility sink for speculative energy
- Prototype control rail for tokenization / programmable finance
- Moral placebo ("bankless", "decentralized") for the ideologically restless
Ethereum is like the R&D lab + casino + early beta for future regulated rails.
They use Ethereum as a test environment and build their own prod networks separately - e.g. Canton which recently partnered with DTCC, JP Morgan, etc.