Author: Lily Liu, President, Solana Foundation
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
Value is becoming programmable.
Markets have become electronic, money has become digital, and finance has moved to the internet. Each shift changed how we trade, pay, and invest, but the assets themselves remained the same. This time, the asset itself is changing.
The tokenization supercycle is a long-term process: the gradual migration of money, assets, and ownership onto always-online internet infrastructure. Viewing it merely as a market rally would mean missing the bigger transformation.
The internet capital markets that result will ultimately become the world's largest capital markets.
The Supercycle Will Reshape Markets
In the early 2000s, China's rapid industrialization pushed commodities into a structural bull cycle lasting years. Economists termed this a "supercycle": changes in supply, demand, and capital allocation that last much longer than ordinary business cycles. Similar cycles occurred in late-19th century America, and in Europe and Japan during post-war reconstruction.
In the past, such shocks typically emerged from one side of the market and spread gradually. Tokenization changes markets from three directions simultaneously: it changes who issues assets, who can invest, and how assets reach investors.
Four forces, previously developing on their own trajectories, are now converging:
-
Stablecoins have proven that money can move on-chain at scale and globally;
-
Financial institutions are bringing assets on-chain;
-
Blockchain infrastructure can now meet the speed and cost demands of real economic activity;
-
AI is creating a new class of economic participants that require programmable money to truly function.
Individually, these four forces each represent a technology cycle. But converging, they bring more than a technological upgrade. In the future, anything of value can be tokenized, with clear and explicit ownership; people can raise capital against it, and trade these assets in a market that never closes.
Issuers: Distribution Capability Determines Valuation
Traditional systems were born in an era when sharing information and transferring value was difficult and expensive. These constraints no longer exist, but the market structure that formed around them persists.
Hence, liquidity remains fragmented. Every market has quality assets, but they may not reach capital willing to hold them, as that capital may be restricted by different regulatory regimes and investment thresholds.
Tokenization broadens market access. Geography is no longer a barrier: assets issued anywhere can potentially reach global investors at any time. Investment size is no longer a barrier: markets once reserved for institutional-sized capital can now be opened to smaller amounts at minimal cost.
This model was proven almost a century ago. American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) converted foreign stocks into a form U.S. investors could buy. Issuers adopted this structure for one reason: by accessing a deeper capital pool, the same cash flows often command a higher valuation. The mechanism and logic are well-proven, but it was costly, narrowly applicable, and required depositary banks and sponsors.
Scaling this mechanism today is essentially a technology problem. Tokenization solves this: it can extend access regardless of asset class or jurisdiction. In the future, an asset's distribution capability will become part of its valuation.
This is already happening. Over the past year, hundreds of billions of dollars in Real World Asset (RWA) value has traded on Solana. Tokenized treasuries, equities, private credit, and other assets are gaining distribution channels and liquidity through on-chain markets. These are early signs that capital, too, can flow freely and be accessible anytime, just like information.
Traditional financial institutions are also exploring this space. The New York Stock Exchange, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), and the London Stock Exchange are all investigating the shape of on-chain equity markets.
Investors: Democratizing Ownership
The same infrastructure gives investors two capabilities: gaining asset ownership, and utilizing assets to access capital.
Owning assets opens markets previously closed due to geography, minimum investment, or investor qualification. Using assets to access capital allows held assets to be put to work: they can be used as collateral for loans or become yield-bearing investments. A massive amount of global wealth exists in forms that are difficult or even impossible to finance. Tokenization can mobilize this dormant wealth.
We can call this goal "universal basic ownership": anyone connected to the internet has the opportunity to own a portion of the value created by economic activity, and to have that portion continue to generate value.
Entry Points: Any App Can Become a Super App
Traditional capital markets are built around intermediaries. Assets typically need to pass through licensed entities to reach investors, with each jurisdiction and asset class often having its own intermediary system. These entities earn fees by providing services between trading parties.
This structure formed because distributing assets was genuinely difficult in the past. The barriers stem from both regulation and integration costs: connecting to payment networks, custodians, and trading venues often takes years.
Programmable money reduces integration costs to the scale of an API call. Any mobile or web app can add payment and trading functionality on top of its existing features. In other words, any app can potentially become a super app.
The true theme is convergence. Payments, settlement, asset issuance, and market trading, which historically relied on separate financial systems, are increasingly running on the same programmable infrastructure.
Solana's low costs and shared liquidity make this convergence possible. Consumer payments, institutional settlement, and global markets can run on the same platform, allowing liquidity to pool and compound across use cases, rather than fragmenting across isolated markets.
This is no longer just an experiment. Visa uses Solana for USDC settlement; PayPal has brought PYUSD payments and fund disbursement capabilities to the network; MoneyGram provides an on/off-ramp; Western Union has launched its USDPT stablecoin on Solana. Over the past year, stablecoin transfer volume on the network exceeded $4.7 trillion.
Issuers, investors, and application entry points will reinforce each other: more issuers create a richer supply of assets; richer assets attract more investors; more investors create stronger liquidity and pricing, attracting even more issuers. Application entry points permeate the entire cycle: each new entry point expands reach on both the asset and capital sides, and each new asset provides more assets for apps to connect and distribute.
AI Accelerates This Cycle
AI will further accelerate this cycle. It introduces a class of economic participants the financial system hasn't seen at scale before: software capable of autonomous economic activity.
With crypto assets, AI agents can assess needs, find services, pay fees, obtain results, and proceed without human-per-transaction initiation. This opens a new form of commerce conducted autonomously by AI agents. AI creates new economic participants, and blockchain provides a programmable, 24/7 financial infrastructure for these participants to transact within.
AI will also amplify the three-sided effects mentioned above. AI infrastructure development will focus market attention on new classes of issuers, as the physical capacity underpinning AI needs financing, creating new asset supply. AI agents will increasingly act as autonomous investors, allocating capital without human intervention; they themselves will also become new transaction entry points.
When ownership and intent can both be machine-readable, asset allocation and settlement can run at machine speed. Energy markets and payment systems will no longer be geographically segmented but built on shared infrastructure. Near-zero-cost payment networks will replace traditional networks charging percentage fees plus fixed fees; 24/7 markets will replace limited trading hours.
Institutions that truly understand this will be far more efficient at financing the next round of physical capacity (data centers, energy, production facilities) than those viewing tokenization as a novelty.
We Are Still in the Early Stages
Compared to traditional markets, on-chain trading volume is still small; the scale of tokenized assets is negligible compared to their traditional security counterparts. This description accurately reflects the present, but it cannot predict the future based on it.
The internet reduced the cost of producing and distributing information to almost zero. What followed wasn't simply "putting newspapers online," but entirely new markets and business models that didn't exist before. Tokenized treasuries represent the "putting newspapers online" phase: a useful demonstration, but not the end goal.
5.5 billion people worldwide are connected to the internet. A financial infrastructure that works anytime, for anyone, supporting any asset, will make the world's largest market—the market around money—accessible. Once global liquidity is online, its pull will be too powerful to resist.
A Borderless Market
Until now, every capital market has had defined entry boundaries: exchange seats, brokerage channels, jurisdictions, and trading hours collectively determine who can enter. Internet capital markets are gradually loosening these boundaries.
The system that truly accommodates this shift will not be an upgraded version of the old system, but a new system being built, one token at a time.
