People are going to look back at tokenization and realise the biggest opportunity wasn’t the token.
It was everything that became possible because the asset was onchain. Now, what the fuck does that actually mean?
Let’s break it down.
In traditional finance, if you own an asset, your options are generally straightforward.
You buy it, hold it or sell it.
Now imagine that same asset exists on a blockchain. Suddenly, it has the potential to interact with an entirely new financial ecosystem.
1. Borrowing against assets
Imagine holding $10,000 worth of tokenised stocks.
Rather than selling them when you need liquidity, you could potentially use them as collateral to borrow funds.
You retain exposure to the asset while accessing liquidity.
2. Lending
You could supply eligible assets to lending protocols, allowing others to borrow against the liquidity you’ve provided.
Your asset is no longer just sitting in your portfolio. It can potentially generate a return.
3. Leverage and looping
Deposit an asset as collateral, borrow against it, use those funds to acquire more assets and repeat.
This is known as looping. It allows you to increase exposure, but also increases risk.
4. Long and short exposure
Through compatible trading and derivatives protocols, tokenised assets could be used to take long positions, betting on prices increasing, or short positions, betting on them falling.
5. Composability
This is one of the most important concepts.
Composability means different applications and protocols can interact with and build upon one another.
Think of financial building blocks.
An asset could be deposited into one protocol, used as collateral in another or incorporated into an entirely different financial product.
This is where DeFi comes in.
DeFi stands for decentralised finance. Essentially, it’s financial services built using blockchain technology and smart contracts, enabling activities like lending, borrowing and trading without necessarily relying on traditional intermediaries.
The bigger picture
Now apply this to stocks, bonds, funds, commodities, private credit and other real-world assets.
The opportunity isn’t simply bringing these assets onchain so people can buy and sell them.
It’s making them usable across an entirely new financial ecosystem.
More ways to access liquidity, put capital to work and build financial products.
The token is the representation.
The ecosystem built around the asset is where the true potential is.
Swarm riders and Swarm-native companies
AI-use even among highly AI-native people is power-law distributed.
There seems to be a new class of people — call them “swarm riders” — who are capable of consistently commanding large swarms of agents to productive ends.
This is a new kind of managerial skill, analogous to the skill it takes to manage large organizations of people, but wholly different in nature and of course more technical.
Based on the swarm riders we know (including many at @Tempo and @Paradigm), these people are capable of productive token spend that is 1000x-10000x higher than median software engineers, and 100x higher than top 5% Claude Code users.
The art of swarm riding is different from software engineering and more akin to machine learning, where practitioners grapple with black box systems: defining reward functions and evals, transmuting non-verifiable problems into verifiable problems, running experiments, etc.
Swarm-native companies are a new class of company founded by and populated by swarm riders. These companies are organized around swarms in a way that conventional companies will struggle to replicate, as the cost of internal human coordination is sand in the gears of an effective swarm. Effective swarm-native companies will define the right reward functions and evals, remove functional and bureaucratic barriers, and then let the swarms cook.
We’ve gotten to see a few swarm-native companies up close — reshaping financial rails @Tempo, building a new gaming platform @Spawn, cyber swarms at Cathedral Systems — and it’s clear these teams wield a significant advantage over pre-AI teams.
Some questions I’ve been wondering about:
1) How fast will swarm riding diffuse through the economy? The implications for token spend could be significant.
2) Can swarms be effectively adopted by existing companies or will it generally track the formation of new swarm-native companies?
3) What becomes scarce as swarm capabilities themselves commoditize (through frontier models becoming better at swarming, swarm capabilities built into harnesses, etc)? Cultures and teams that can define reward functions well and otherwise get out of the way?
New essay out on the @multicoin blog, which is an evolution of our thinking on DeFi value capture
TLDR is in a world where software costs trend to zero, finance is one of the most obvious industries where moats will exist and DeFi is perfectly positioned https://t.co/iXBtFnZndw