Perspective: Everything will be Token

Original title:Everything Will Be a Token, by:Raoul PalFounder of Real Vision; compiled: Gold Book

In May 2014, I just moved to the Cayman Islands. I think the best way to get this place up is to get 25 GMI members to Grand Cayman -- that was the first round table we later called. In those two days, everyone in the room pulled out their biggest thoughts. We talked about China's devaluation, about the forthcoming El Niño and heard a gentleman say about his gold storage business — he was quite proud to describe it as “a paranoia of macro investors designed for other paranoia macro investors”. It was a very good weekend.

Then a group of permanent members stood up. They invested in a small bitcoin exchange in Singapore. By the time they sat down, they had completely and completely turned over everyone's perception in that room — including myself. I walked out of the meeting room convinced that I had just heard the most significant technological advances since the Internet was invented, and that was what I wrote in my public articles.

What I was looking for was an introduction to pay or "digital gold", which turned out to be: once the currency was stripped off, what was the nature of the blockchain -- it was a book of accounts. A book that you could write on it, which no one could keep and no one could alter. I remember sitting there, thinking fast about what that meant; I wrote this to the subscriber when I returned to the desk:

"As soon as you realize that if you hang anything on a bitcoin, it can be recorded, then you have a time-stamped, decentrized proof of ownership of everything. Imagine a world in which every insurance contract, derivative contract, house transaction, title deed, purchase certificate, etc. can be stored in a decentrized manner. Bitcoin can label, record and validate ownership of every stock, bond and securities, as well as every derivative contract. " .

I call it "the world's own books" and say that it will replace the scrambling, undercapitalized, repeatedly mortgaged hosting system that I described as being in a financial rotting heart — I dare say because I spent my entire career in this system, and I know exactly how broken it is. It's so huge and it's so new. I put it all together in one sentence, and for many years now, I've been quoting it again and again: "bitcoin, I get it. And you? " .

Twelve years later, this set of arguments has a shorter name: everything will be a token.

The idea was right. The chain was wrong.

Let's just say, even if the chain is wrong, we were right. It didn't happen on bitcoin -- it turns out it was only one thing that it was good at (a currency that no one could devalue, and it remained on this track since then). The idea of "recording everything" moved to a chain created for programmable contracts. There, a token could carry ownership and logic, and the rest of the story happened there.

But for the next few years, nothing great happened.

The exciting things on my list in 2014 didn't go down: no one monetized the housing market, insurance contracts continued to lie in a filing cabinet and a few real estate coins were issued, basically lying there.

The first thing that moves is the one that no one bothers to get excited about – dollars. A simple dollar on a chain can be redeemed at 1:1, and anyone on Earth can hold and transfer it at any given time, at less than a cent. At the time of writing this article, these kinds of dollars are about $30 billion.

After the dollar, it's the next simplest thing — the United States Treasury debt.And that's where the story starts, not a encryption circle.

Where we are now.

As of September 20, the dollar-based US Treasury Fund was about $14.8 billion. Look at all the issuers: Bellad, Franklin Dunpton, Morgan Chase, Fuda, Kyung-soon, WisdomTree, Dow and VanEck.

The stock is right behind it.I'm sorry. In June 2025, Robinhod and Kraken both launched a daily five-day-a-week currencyization equity deal; Robinwood also allows European clients to hold tokens for tracking private companies, including SpaceX and OpenAI. Nine months later, regulation caught up with the market. In March, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved NASDAQ rules that allow securities to be traded in a monetized form, with the depositary trust company (DTC) being responsible for casting these coins; A month later, the New York Stock Exchange ' s own rules were also approved. NASDAQ plans to implement 23 hours trading day from December 6th. Stripe hatched its own blockchain, Tempo, built to stabilize the currency settlement with partners such as Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Klarna and Silver.

This is the RWA wave of real world assets.It's worth the excitement. Think about what it means to finance: markets that never close; (b) The sum in seconds, not days; The Fund can rebalance itself with its own assets, which are self-balancing bonds. A 20-year-old Indian young man who never had access to apple stock can now hold a portion of his mobile phone. Every company can reach every saver on Earth, and every saver can reach the best in the world. This is a strategy for a country that has a large debt to pay, as most countries do.

That $14.8 billion in dollar-denominated United States Treasury debt, the equivalent of US Treasury debt stock is $31 trillion – less than 0.05 per cent. All non-stable currency assets add up to over $30 billion. The world’s largest balance sheets have determined that this is the direction of the financial system, and so far they have moved only a round error level.

Your pattern is too small...

But most people's imagination stops at the market: faster settlements, longer trading times, cheaper thresholds. Consider monetization as an upgrade to financial pipelines. This is how the industry uses this word, and that's why the whole thing was placed in the "real world asset" drawer -- as if it were really interesting to ask, "What are the next available assets that are packaged up?"

That's too small an idea.It's nice to be able to trade in apple stock on Sunday, but it doesn't mean anything.

What's a token?

Back to what I saw in Cayman. The chain of blocks can record anything, so the really important question is: What is this "anything"? That means asking: what is a Token?

A Token is information that a machine can read, authenticate, price and trade without having to ask humans throughout the process.It also happens to be a good container for dollars or shares — that's why dollars and stocks go first, but it's a container that doesn't care what it contains.

Throughout human history, we have quantified values only in a narrow category of things: money, and the right to demand future currencies that we call "securities." Our system is built for recording and trading these things, because this is the form human beings value and can be measured by others. So when a new book comes up, we put the currency and securities on it. We certainly do so.

And what we are building today is an economy in which the most active players are not human.That's the core of my "Exponential Age" framework -- I wrote here before, and that's what my new book, The Everything Code, is about to be published. The world financial system has a human interface, and it's not just about being able to get out of the market.The new participants are not human. Within five years, I expect smart bodies to double the number of users on the Internet, encryption and AI themselves.Billions of new residents arrive at the same time, and none of them can use what we built.

The smarts are not about dollars and securities.What a smart body needs is information: who are you, whether you're allowed to do this, how much it costs now, who that thing belongs to, and whether it's true or not.In a machine economy, information is value, and money is just one of the thousands of messages.

"everything" means everything.

Starting with identity, because everything else depends on it.Every person in this economy, every intelligence body, needs a machine-verifiable certificate. The first problem for real people is to prove that you are real. AI can now browse, buy, brush and sign, and every company based on the assumption that "one man behind one click" is finding out that it no longer exists.The answer is, you have a list of "human proofs" in the form of Token. It's built on zero-knowledge certificates.- Zero proves that you can prove something about yourself without exposing it. So you can prove that you're 18 years of age without disclosing your birthday, or that you passed KyC without having to hand over your passport again. It has entered the mainstream product. World has certified about 18 million real people by the spring of this year, and has been connected to Zoom, Docussign and Tinder.

Every smart person has to prove who is doing this economic act, for whom and by what authority. Multiply that number by billions of hours with thousands of calls of smarts, and think about the size of identity alone. Identity is the key to unlocking everything that follows, and it is one of the markets that I know is least discussed.

Then the contract.The 2014 list, finally starting to land. A ticket is a contract between you and the museum. A booking is a contract between you and the hotel; An insurance policy, a quality assurance, maintenance records for a vehicle, permission to enter a building or read a document. Each of them is a promise attached to identity, while one Token is a promise attached to identity that machines can be identified in milliseconds. The estate will end up here — after every registration agency on the planet has reached a consensus on what a title is.

And then attention.And here it is, things are no longer just financial.In a world where machines can generate unlimited content, human attention is the only thing that remains scarce, which means it is the only thing still valuable.Today, you rent your audience from the platform, set terms and take away economic gains. Token allows creators, musicians and communities to have their own network, rather than rent it. And that's not just the creator. What you look at, what you know, the data your body produces, every form of human attention can be a token that you own and get paid for. Someone has calculated the share of advertising income with users, concluding that it's very small. This is a serious underestimation, as it measures human attention in units of the old economy. In the new economy, when machines work, it's one of the answers to "what people earn on."

And then there's the raw materials of machine economy.Every smart body is consuming energy, computing and data. Energy availability is calculative, numerical output information and attention, which are extracted into intelligence. Each layer depends on the one below it, and the higher the unit value, the higher it moves up. As the number of intelligents multiply, each layer is tokened so that machines trade with one another at a machine speed. A thousand watt-hours becomes a Token. One second GPU time becomes a Token. A data set became a Token — the latest in all markets, because it had no buyers before.

And here, I want to draw your attention to something. You're already living in a Token-based economy, but it's central. Salesforce is a Token factory: it extracts a lot of proprietary data into information and sells them back to you. Alphabet and Meta are Token factories, but also the market for attention. ICE, the world ' s largest trading bloc, is a Token Exchange and sells token-related data that it trades. These businesses are worth hundreds of billions of dollars because they have both factories and markets, and neither of them is yours. What has changed is that factories and markets are moving towards openness, operating on unowned tracks, and Token can be held by anyone — including those whose data and attention have actually produced it.

That's what the "index age" really means.Every message in the world, about everything and everyone, becomes a unit that can be owned, priced and exchanged.The book I saw in 2014 "the book of records" was not a better account book for humans to remember. It was an operating system for economies that were still unborn at the time. If you wanted to follow any of those clues -- identity, attention, arithmetical markets -- that's why I did the Raoulpal.ai. It trained with everything I wrote, including the book; it would debate with you and help you really understand these concepts.

That meter is melting.

Put these together, you'll get to a place where Financial Affairs will never go.

We are about to have an economy in which billions of non-human participants create, trade and consume values at the machine ' s rate, units of which have never been designed for human count. Most of these activities take place at a level that we cannot see directly. When one smart person buys a single-second calculator from another intelligent person to validate a certificate so that the third smart person settles a contract, no one is paid for, no product is shipped and nothing appears on the payroll or receipt. However, value has been created, priced and exchanged, all of which is recorded in the books.

Soon, the whole set of devices that we have built for thousands of years to score a scarce human economy will no longer describe reality — because the one it refers to has become a shrinking part of the real economy. That's what I mean.Economic Speciality: Economies accelerate to a point beyond what human-centred measurements can follow.The tool failed because the machine ran faster than the dashboard could show.

But a system built for scarcity is starting to collapse, and that's the prerequisite for its replacement. When information itself becomes the most valuable thing in an economy, every piece of it becomes a possession of Token, which is a new wealth – created by something that never counts as assets before.Your attention. Your identity. Your data. You can spare your calculus, you can produce energy. For the first time in history, the raw materials of an economy have become something that ordinary people can produce just because they exist.And now there is a way to have it and get it paid instead of being harvested by the platform. Those who realize this long ago will take up a position in the new economy where no counterpart can be found in the old economy.

And we're just beginning to imagine it. In 2014, we sat in a room and thought that putting property deeds on the books was already the most exciting part. The truly interesting business of the next decade will be built on what no one in that room has a word to describe, in markets that have not yet emerged and priced at units that we have not invented. The economy as a whole will be rebuilt upwards from its own books and, subsequently, from the way in which we value, price and account for our lives ...

This is where The Everything Code takes you. The book outlines the entire journey: the demographic trap in which we live; why debt and currency depreciated; why index technology is the only way out; and why the "economic singularity" at the end of the journey deserves optimism, not fear.