Author: Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation

Translation: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

Value is becoming programmable.

The market is moving towards electronicization, currency towards digitization, and finance towards the internet. Each transition has changed the way transactions, payments, and investments occur, yet the assets themselves remain unchanged; this time, what is changing is the assets themselves.

The tokenization supercycle is a long-term process: currency, assets, and ownership are gradually migrating to always-online internet infrastructure. If viewed merely as a market uptrend, one misses the larger transformation behind it.

The resulting internet capital market will ultimately become the largest capital market in the world.

The supercycle will reshape the market

In the early 21st century, China's rapid industrialization drove commodities into a prolonged structural upcycle. Economists refer to this as a "supercycle": a more extended change in supply, demand, and capital allocation that lasts longer than ordinary business cycles. The late 19th century in the United States and post-war reconstruction periods in Europe and Japan experienced similar cycles.

In the past, such shocks would usually start from one end of the market and gradually transmit; tokenization, however, changes the market simultaneously from three directions: it alters who issues assets, who can invest, and how assets reach investors.

Four forces that once developed along their own paths are now converging:

• Stablecoins demonstrate that currency can circulate on-chain on a large scale globally;

• Financial institutions are bringing assets on-chain;

• Blockchain infrastructure is now capable of meeting the speed and cost requirements of real economic activities;

• AI is creating a new class of economic participants, which relies on programmable currency to function effectively.

Individually, these four forces represent a technological cycle; but combined, they bring more than just technological upgrades. In the future, anything of value could potentially be tokenized and correspond to clear and defined ownership; people can obtain financing based on this and trade these assets in a market that never closes.

Issuers: Distribution capability determines valuation

The traditional system was born in an era where information sharing and value transfer were very difficult and costly. Now, these two limitations no longer exist, yet the market structure established as a result still remains.

Consequently, liquidity remains fragmented. Each market has high-quality assets, but may not reach the funds willing to hold them, as these funds may be constrained by different regulatory systems and investment thresholds.

Tokenization widens the market channels. Geography is no longer a barrier: assets issued anywhere can potentially reach global investors at any time. Investment size is also no longer a barrier: markets originally aimed at institutional funds can now open to smaller funds at very low costs.

This model was actually validated over a century ago. American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) converted foreign stocks into forms accessible to American investors. The reason issuers adopted this structure is simple: entering a deeper capital pool often allows the same cash flow to achieve a higher valuation. Its mechanism and underlying logic have long been validated; it merely requires the involvement of depositary banks and sponsors, and was cost-prohibitive and limited in scope.

Now, expanding this mechanism to a larger scale is essentially a technical problem. Tokenization solves this: whether asset class or legal jurisdiction, it can access this mechanism. In the future, the ability to distribute assets will become part of the valuation.

This is already happening. In the past year, real-world assets (RWA) valued in the hundreds of billions have been traded on Solana. Tokenized government bonds, stocks, private credit, and other assets are gaining distribution channels and liquidity through on-chain markets. These are early signs that capital can flow as freely as information and be available at any time.

Traditional financial institutions are also beginning to explore this field. The New York Stock Exchange, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), and the London Stock Exchange are all researching specific forms of on-chain stock markets.

Investors: Making ownership accessible

The same infrastructure will provide investors with two capabilities: obtaining asset ownership and financing using those assets.

Owning assets allows access to markets that were previously closed due to geography, minimum investment amounts, or investor qualification thresholds; financing using assets enables previously held assets to play a real role: they can be used as collateral for loans or become revenue-generating investments. A vast amount of global wealth exists in forms that are hard to finance or even cannot be pledged. Tokenization can activate this dormant wealth.

This goal can be called "universal foundational ownership": anyone with internet access has the opportunity to own a portion of the value created by economic activities and let this portion of assets continue to generate value.

Entry: Any application can become a super application

Traditional capital markets are built around intermediary institutions. For assets to reach investors, they typically need to go through licensed institutions, and each jurisdiction and asset class often has its own intermediary system. These institutions charge fees for providing services between the two sides of a transaction.

This structure formed because previously distributing assets was indeed very difficult. The barriers of this system come both from regulations and integration costs: accessing payment networks, custodian institutions, and trading venues often takes years.

Programmable currency reduces integration costs to the level of a single API call. Any mobile or web application can add payment and trading functionalities on top of existing features. In other words, any application could potentially become a super application.

The real main line is integration. Payments, settlements, asset issuance, and market trading, which previously relied on different financial systems, are now increasingly running on the same programmable infrastructure.

Solana's low cost and shared liquidity make this integration possible. Consumer payments, institutional settlements, and global markets can operate on the same platform, allowing liquidity to gather and accumulate across different application scenarios, rather than being dispersed in isolated markets.

This is no longer just an experiment. Visa is using Solana for USDC settlements; PayPal has brought PYUSD payments and fund distribution capabilities to the network; MoneyGram provides conversion channels between fiat and digital assets; Western Union has launched the USDPT stablecoin on Solana. In the past year, the stablecoin transaction volume on this network exceeded $4.7 trillion.

Issuers, investors, and application entries will also mutually promote each other: the more issuers there are, the richer the asset supply; the richer the assets, the more they can attract investors; the more investors there are, the stronger the liquidity and more adequate the pricing, which in turn attracts more issuers. Application entries run throughout the entire loop: each new entry expands the reach of both assets and funds, while each new asset will provide more targets for applications to access and distribute.

AI accelerates this cycle

AI will further expedite this cycle. It brings a type of economic participant that has never appeared on a large scale in the financial system before: software that can autonomously complete economic activities.

With crypto assets, AI Agents can autonomously assess demand, seek services, pay fees, obtain results, and then continue to act without the need for humans to initiate each transaction individually. This will open up a new business form where transactions are autonomously completed by AI Agents. AI creates new economic participants, while blockchain provides a programmable, always-on financial infrastructure for them to complete transactions.

AI will also further amplify the previously mentioned three-way effects. AI infrastructure development will draw market attention towards a new set of issuers, as the essential production capacity supporting AI development requires financing, and this financing will bring about entirely new asset supply. AI Agents will increasingly act as autonomous investors, allocating capital without human intervention; they will also become new transaction entry points.

When ownership and intent can be read by machines, asset allocation and settlement can operate at machine speed. Energy markets and payment systems will no longer be divided by geography but will be built on shared infrastructure. Near-zero cost payment networks will replace traditional networks that charge proportionate fees based on transaction amounts while stacking fixed fees; always-on markets will replace limited trading hours.

Institutions that truly understand this will provide financing for the next round of physical production capacity (data centers, energy, and manufacturing facilities) more efficiently than those treating tokenization as a novelty.

We are still in the early stages

Compared to traditional markets, on-chain transaction volumes remain very small; tokenized assets scale is also so small that it is nearly negligible compared to their traditional counterparts. Such a description accurately reflects the present but cannot predict the future based on this.

The internet has reduced the production and distribution costs of information to nearly zero. What follows is not simply "moving newspapers online," but a completely new market and business model that has never existed before. Tokenized government bonds represent the "newspaper going online" stage: it is a useful demonstration, but not the endpoint.

5.5 billion people worldwide have internet access. A financial infrastructure that can serve all people at any time and support any asset will make the largest global market centered around capital accessible. Once global liquidity is online, its attraction will be overwhelming.

Borderless markets

So far, every capital market has defined entry boundaries: exchange seats, brokerage channels, jurisdictions, and operating hours collectively determine who can enter. The internet capital market is gradually loosening these boundaries.

The system truly embracing this transition will not merely be an upgraded version of the old system, but a new system that is being built gradually by individual tokens.

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