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tokenization is much more than finance
Issue #014••10 min read

What Tokenization Can Do?

Forget finance for a second. Forget treasuries and condos. Let's talk about you, me, and the weird little moments in life that actually matter. Tokenization isn't just about money—it's about proof, privacy, and power.

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TL;DR

  • •Tokenization enables selective transparency - prove you're over 18 without showing ID, prove top 5% Solidity dev without LinkedIn, prove income threshold without revealing salary. Zero-Knowledge Proofs let you verify facts without exposing private data.
  • •Beyond finance: Musicians tokenize royalty streams (fans invest + earn alongside), property fractionalizes (global access to luxury condos), carbon credits become tradeable (transparent environmental impact), luxury goods authenticate via immutable provenance (combating forgery).
  • •Gaming assets (avatars, skins, land) move across platforms with portable ownership. Academic credentials mint as verified tokens - prove qualifications globally without sharing documents. Health data tokens give patients control - grant temporary doctor access without exposing entire records.
  • •WEF, Fireblocks, GrowthTurbine project tokenized real-world assets will surpass $10 trillion by 2030 (real estate, art, energy, IP, personal data). Future: AI data ownership fractionalized, decentralized insurance policies as tradable tokens, tokenized intellectual capital for startup IP portfolios.

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Forget Finance for a Second

Forget treasuries and condos.

Let's talk about you, me, and the weird little moments in life that actually matter.

Imagine a world where…

  • You're online dating. You prove you're real, local, and over 18 - without ever uploading a face pic.
  • You're job hunting in Web3. You prove you're top 5% on-chain as a Solidity dev - without giving up your LinkedIn.
  • You're claiming a crypto airdrop. You prove you didn't double-dip - without linking your wallet publicly.
  • You're trying to get a loan. You prove your income meets the threshold - but the bank never sees your actual salary.
  • You're joining a private event or metaverse club. You prove NFT ownership - without revealing which one.
  • You're voting in a DAO. You cast your vote with full weight - but no one can trace your holdings.

This isn't theory. This is optional transparency. Proof - without exposure.

And that's when tokenization stops being a financial tool and becomes a human one.

“

"Tokenization isn't about speed. It's about proof. And used right, it's power."

But there is so much more that can be tokenized. The potential is really amazing.

Digital Identity and Privacy

Tokenization enables selective transparency - the ability to prove facts about yourself without revealing private data. People can verify age, residency, or professional credibility using cryptographic proofs rather than personal documents. Projects like Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) identity solutions let users confirm they're over 18 for dating apps, qualified for jobs, or eligible for loans without exposing exact information.

Intellectual Property and Royalties

Creators are turning IP into liquid assets. Musicians tokenize royalty streams, letting fans invest directly and earn alongside them. Authors or inventors can fractionalize ownership of book rights or patents. Tokenized royalty systems use smart contracts to automatically distribute payments, removing middlemen like publishers or labels.

Real Estate and Infrastructure

Property tokenization brings liquidity and accessibility to one of the least flexible asset classes. From luxury condos to community solar farms, buildings are represented as tradable tokens. This fractionalizes ownership, reduces costs, and enables global access. Governments and institutions are deploying similar frameworks for public infrastructure projects, letting citizens invest directly in local development.

Commodities and Carbon Credits

Tokenized commodities like gold or oil are tradeable 24/7 with full backing verification. Meanwhile, carbon credits and renewable energy tokens make environmental impact investments transparent and tradeable. This helps corporations offset emissions while investors fund sustainable growth.

Debt and Private Credit Markets

Private credit and corporate debt, traditionally available only to institutions, are being fractionalized via tokens. Investors can buy micro-shares in structured debt or SME loans, while issuers access capital faster and more cheaply. Tokenized debt is already live in Treasury bill pilots and yield-bearing on-chain products.

Luxury Goods and Collectibles

Tokenization authenticates and fractionalizes luxury items like watches, art, or fine wine. Each token represents verified ownership and provenance, combating forgery and enabling global investment in cultural assets.

Supply Chain Provenance

Luxury fashion, pharmaceutical, and food industries are adopting tokenization to track product origin and authenticity. Every step - from raw material sourcing to retail delivery - is recorded as an immutable digital token ledger entry, strengthening ethical sourcing and consumer trust.

Gaming and Digital Ownership

In gaming and metaverse environments, in-game assets like avatars, skins, or land can be tokenized. These can move across platforms, ensuring portable digital ownership. Players truly own and trade their virtual assets, driving cross-platform economies that mirror real-world markets.

Education and Credentials

Academic degrees, certificates, and skills credentials can be minted as verified tokens. Anyone can prove qualifications instantly, globally, and without sharing underlying documents - creating a secure backbone for global digital labor markets.

Health and Personal Data

Health-care providers can tokenize patient data, giving individuals control over access permissions. A person can grant temporary access to medical researchers or doctors without exposing entire records, protecting privacy while enabling AI-driven care innovation.

“

"Tokenization enables selective transparency - the ability to prove facts about yourself without revealing private data."

Voting, DAOs, and Governance

Blockchain-based organizations (DAOs) use tokenized voting systems to assign weight and ensure verifiable participation while keeping individual holdings private. Governments and private entities are experimenting with similar systems for secure digital voting.

Loyalty, Rewards, and Micro-Transactions

Brands tokenize loyalty points, allowing instant transfer, redemption, or trade. Instead of siloed loyalty systems, points become interoperable digital assets with tangible real-world value - usable across ecosystems.

Future Potentials

Looking ahead, experts forecast tokenization expanding into:

  • AI data ownership – where datasets can be fractionalized, ensuring that contributors get compensated via tokens.
  • Decentralized insurance models – with policies converted into tradable or collateralized tokens.
  • Tokenized real-world donations – tracking philanthropic funds transparently from donor to impact.
  • Tokenized intellectual capital – allowing partial ownership of research labs or startup IP portfolios.

Reports from the World Economic Forum, Fireblocks, and GrowthTurbine project that tokenized real-world assets could surpass $10 trillion in value by 2030, encompassing everything from real estate to art, energy, IP, and personal data.

These examples, spanning both human and financial contexts, illustrate how tokenization transforms proof into privacy, access into equity, and ownership into opportunity. It is no longer just a fintech evolution; it's becoming an infrastructure for digital trust itself.

What's Next?

The next wave of tokenization will transform industries we haven't even considered yet. From AI-owned assets to tokenized time itself, the infrastructure is being built right now, under the radar.

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MCMS Brief • Classification: Public • Sector: Digital Assets • Region: Global

References

  1. 1. National Institute of Standards and Technology - “Personal Identity Verification (PIV) - Cryptographic Algorithms (NIST SP 800-78-5)” (January 1, 2025) [Link]
  2. 2. Internet Policy Review - “The Impact of Zero-Knowledge Proofs on Digital Identity under eIDAS and GDPR” (January 1, 2024) [Link]
  3. 3. Nature Scientific Reports - “Tokenization of Patents as Non-Fungible Tokens on Blockchain” (February 17, 2022) [Link]
  4. 4. Bank for International Settlements - Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures - “Distributed Ledger Technology in Payment, Clearing and Settlement Systems” (February 1, 2017) [Link]
  5. 5. SSRN Electronic Journal - “Trading Tokenized Properties: Empirical Evidence from 2.4 Million Blockchain Transactions” (January 15, 2025) [Link]
  6. 6. Deloitte Luxembourg - “Unlocking the Tokenized Economy: EFAMA and ESMA Promote Digital Progress” (December 1, 2024) [Link]
  7. 7. Algorand Foundation / Enel Group - “Enel Tokenizing Renewable Energy Assets on Algorand - Case Study” (January 1, 2025) [Link]
  8. 8. The World Bank Group - “World Bank Partners with Swiss National Bank on Digital Bond Settlement using Wholesale CBDC” (May 15, 2024) [Link]
  9. 9. International Monetary Fund - “Tokenization and Financial Market Inefficiencies (IMF FinTech Note)” (January 29, 2025) [Link]
  10. 10. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission - “SEC Project Proposal: Tokenized Debt Instruments and Investment Contracts” (September 15, 2025) [Link]
  11. 11. Bank for International Settlements - “BIS Annual Economic Report 2025 - Chapter III: Tokenisation in Financial Markets” (June 1, 2025) [Link]
  12. 12. McKinsey & Company - “From Ripples to Waves: The Transformational Power of Tokenizing Assets” (November 1, 2024) [Link]
  13. 13. Boston Consulting Group - “Tokenized Funds: The Third Revolution in Asset Management Decoded” (October 29, 2024) [Link]
  14. 14. World Economic Forum - “Asset Tokenization in Financial Markets 2025 - White Paper” (January 1, 2025) [Link]
  15. 15. Fudan University - School of Management - “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Empirical Analysis of Governance Centralization” (January 1, 2025) [Link]
  16. 16. PMC - National Institutes of Health - “Blockchain Technology for Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Traceability and Authentication” (February 1, 2023) [Link]
  17. 17. Nature Scientific Reports - “Blockchain-Based Academic Credential Verification Systems: Performance and Security Analysis” (January 15, 2025) [Link]

SOURCE FILES

Source Files expand the factual layer beneath each MCMS Brief — the verified data, primary reports, and legal records that make the story real.

Privacy-Preserving Digital Identity and Zero-Knowledge Authentication

The article's vision of 'optional transparency' - proving age without ID, proving developer skills without LinkedIn, proving income thresholds without revealing salary - is grounded in cryptographic standards and emerging regulatory frameworks. NIST Special Publication 800-78-5 establishes federal cryptographic algorithms and key sizes for identity verification in Personal Identity Verification (PIV) systems, providing the technical foundation for secure credential validation. The European Union's amended eIDAS Regulation creates requirements for electronic attestations of attributes within European Digital Identity Wallets, but faces tensions with GDPR's data minimisation principle. Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) resolve this regulatory tension by enabling unlinkability and unobservability - allowing authentication without revealing sensitive information while maintaining cryptographic verifiability. Academic research published in Internet Policy Review demonstrates that ZKP-based authentication systems significantly reduce impersonation risks while ensuring accurate, private, and tamper-resistant verification. These privacy-preserving protocols enable the exact use cases the article describes: identity-free payments, tax submissions without revealing exact earnings, dating app age verification without face photos, DAO voting with full weight but no holdings traceability, and trustless outsourcing where organizations validate results without redoing entire operations. This isn't theoretical future technology - it's operational infrastructure validated by federal standards (NIST), regulatory frameworks (eIDAS), and peer-reviewed cryptographic research.

(NIST SP 800-78-5 - PIV Cryptographic Algorithms|Internet Policy Review - ZKP Impact on eIDAS and GDPR)

Real-World Asset Tokenization: Intellectual Property, Real Estate, and Renewable Energy

The article's claim that 'creators are turning IP into liquid assets' and 'property tokenization brings liquidity to one of the least flexible asset classes' is validated by both academic research and major institutional implementations. Nature Scientific Reports published peer-reviewed research demonstrating that patents can be tokenized as NFTs with unique identification enabling automated royalty collection through embedded smart contracts, addressing the estimated $1 trillion-plus opportunity in the patent market where only 2-5% of intellectual property is currently valued due to inadequate identification and trading mechanisms. For real estate, SSRN published comprehensive empirical analysis of 2,409,303 blockchain transactions from April 2019 to May 2024, including 572,437 secondary market transactions across 673 tokenized properties. The research found tokenized properties averaged 254 owners, demonstrating successful fragmented ownership, but also revealed significant limitations: property ownership changes approximately once yearly, token prices move according to house price indices rather than creating new liquidity, and Automated Market Makers (AMMs) fail when applied to heterogeneous and illiquid asset classes like real estate. The Bank for International Settlements' Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures acknowledged tokenization's potential to reduce complexity in securities settlements by facilitating simpler and automated processes, while ESMA and EFAMA guidance under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime emphasizes flexible, risk-based regulatory frameworks. Enel Group, Europe's largest private electricity distribution company, introduced tokenized fractional ownership of solar panels and wind farms on the Algorand blockchain through the ebitts program in January 2025, enabling 12 million Italian customers to virtually self-produce renewable energy. This validates the article's carbon credits and renewable energy token claims with operational infrastructure from a major European utility, demonstrating tokenization's expansion from financial instruments into physical energy infrastructure.

(Nature Scientific Reports - Patents as NFTs|SSRN - 2.4M Blockchain Real Estate Transactions Study|BIS CPMI - DLT in Payment and Settlement Systems|Deloitte - ESMA/EFAMA DLT Pilot Regime Analysis|Enel/Algorand - Tokenized Renewable Energy Case Study)

Debt Markets and Institutional Tokenization Infrastructure

The article's assertion that 'tokenized debt is already live in Treasury bill pilots and yield-bearing on-chain products' understates the sophistication of institutional implementations. The World Bank pioneered blockchain-operated debt instruments in 2018 with bond-i (blockchain operated new debt instrument) as the world's first global bond using distributed ledger technology. In May 2024, the World Bank issued CHF 200 million in digital bonds on the SIX Digital Exchange, settled using wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (wCBDC) provided by the Swiss National Bank - the first CHF digital bond by an international issuer to settle using wCBDC. This seven-year bond represents the largest World Bank CHF issuance since 2009 and demonstrates operational integration of tokenized debt with central bank infrastructure. The International Monetary Fund's FinTech Note on tokenization identifies that tokenization directly addresses core inefficiencies in traditional markets: settlement delays, excessive intermediation, limited access, and operational complexity. BIS research on tokenized government bonds shows mean bid-ask spreads of 19 basis points compared to 30 for conventional bonds, empirically validating improved liquidity and tighter spreads. However, regulatory frameworks constrain implementation approaches. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has clarified that tokenized debt instruments representing investment contracts in loan pools are treated as securities regardless of blockchain technology, requiring issuers to register or use regulatory exemptions. ESMA has affirmed that using distributed ledger technology does not automatically classify an asset as a crypto-asset - a tokenized note is regulated as a note. These regulatory constraints explain why most tokenized private credit protocols operate using private placement exemptions limited to accredited investors, rather than creating fully democratized retail access as the article's tone might suggest.

(World Bank + SNB - Digital Bond Settlement with wCBDC|IMF FinTech Note - Tokenization and Market Inefficiencies|SEC - Tokenized Debt Regulatory Framework)

Market Infrastructure Evolution and Institutional Projections

The article cites World Economic Forum, Fireblocks, and GrowthTurbine projections that tokenized real-world assets could surpass $10 trillion by 2030. Institutional estimates vary significantly: Boston Consulting Group forecasts $16 trillion by 2030 representing 10% of global GDP, while McKinsey provides more conservative estimates of $1-4 trillion acknowledging slower-than-expected 2024 growth rates. However, these projections focus on market size rather than the transformational infrastructure changes institutions are implementing. The BIS Annual Economic Report 2025 proposes that the 'trilogy' of tokenized central bank reserves, commercial bank money, and government bonds represents the next logical step to deliver profound change for the financial system. BIS General Manager Agustín Carstens emphasized that 'tokenization can be the future of a financial system with a sophistication that we cannot imagine today,' highlighting programmability within tokens enabling new types of contingent transactions. The BIS Innovation Hub, in collaboration with central banks worldwide, has experimented with tokenization across multiple projects including Project Agorá (harnessing tokenization to improve cross-border payments) and monetary policy tokenized toolkits built using smart contracts (tested for paying interest on reserves and executing asset purchases/sales). The World Economic Forum's comprehensive 2025 white paper on asset tokenization in financial markets identifies real estate, private equity, bonds, commodities, carbon credits, intellectual property, and personal data as transformation targets, emphasizing that tokenization enables 24/7 trading, fractional ownership, and streamlined settlement transforming traditionally illiquid assets into accessible investments. Real-world asset tokenization has grown approximately 85% year-on-year reaching $15.2 billion in 2025, with institutional investors contributing nearly 70% of total deployed capital in 2024. Tokenized treasury and money-market fund assets grew to $7.4 billion in 2025, reflecting an 80% increase year-to-date, with Franklin Templeton processing over $1 billion daily in tokenized assets while Hamilton Lane and BlackRock have launched tokenized funds.

(BIS Annual Economic Report 2025 - Tokenisation Chapter|McKinsey - Transformational Power of Tokenizing Assets|BCG - Tokenized Funds Third Revolution|WEF - Asset Tokenization in Financial Markets 2025)

Decentralized Governance, Supply Chain Provenance, and Academic Credentials

The article's claims about DAO voting systems, supply chain tokenization, and academic credential verification are substantiated by peer-reviewed research, though empirical findings reveal significant gaps between decentralized ideals and operational realities. Fudan University's School of Management published comprehensive empirical analysis of DAO governance revealing significant centralization despite decentralized architecture: the average Gini coefficient for voting power distribution in proposals is approximately 0.8, with top decile voters controlling 76.2% of voting power and the largest single voter holding 37.5% on average. This concentration results from token allocation schemes where early-stage investors and core team members receive approximately 28.8% and 20.6% of distributed tokens respectively, combined with active token holders purchasing from less-engaged investors to strengthen influence. The article's promise of 'verifiable participation while keeping individual holdings private' is cryptographically achievable through ZKP-based voting systems, but the empirical reality shows extreme power concentration. For supply chain provenance, PMC research published by the National Institutes of Health demonstrates that blockchain improves pharmaceutical supply chain management by enabling end-to-end traceability, data transparency, real-time verification, and better product recall management. Tokenization creates transparent and immutable records of each product's journey, allowing stakeholders from manufacturers to consumers to track goods in real time. Digital IDs for products are uploaded onto blockchain as new blocks linked to transaction points, creating traceable and immutable historical data. The eZTracker platform, deployed in production environments, successfully recorded and tracked more than 2 million labeled products on blockchain in 2022, validating operational feasibility at scale. Academic credentials tokenization has moved from concept to implementation. Nature Scientific Reports published research demonstrating that blockchain ensures authenticity and traceability of academic credentials through hybrid blockchain networks with Byzantine consensus. Prototype implementations show initial credential registration on blockchain averaging 2.97 seconds, with block replication in 0.02 seconds, record signing latency of 0.96 seconds, and Byzantine consensus completion in 0.12 seconds - all with moderate resource consumption. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) implemented blockchain-based systems issuing digital diplomas to graduates, allowing secure and easy sharing with employers. Generated credentials verifiable via QR codes reinforce trust and reduce academic fraud, enabling the article's vision of 'proving qualifications instantly, globally, and without sharing underlying documents.'

(Fudan University - DAO Governance Centralization Study|PMC/NIH - Blockchain Pharmaceutical Supply Chain|Nature Scientific Reports - Blockchain Credential Verification)

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