In the next decade, the most valuable things may become tokens In the cryptocurrency circle, when it comes to tokens, many people's first reaction is tokens. Further down the line, there are altcoins, Tugou coins, exchanges, K-lines, and sharp rises and falls. This understanding cannot be mistaken, after all, in the past few years, most people have known about tokens and indeed started from buying them. But tokens are never just "coins". More precisely, Token is a type of credential. It can represent value, as well as rights, identities, qualifications, usage permissions, and even a passport within a system. Casino chips are tokens, amusement park game coins are tokens, and membership points, coupons, tickets, essentially all have the shadow of tokens. They may not necessarily have value in themselves, but they represent some kind of right that can be identified, used, exchanged, or transferred. So tokenization, in simpler terms, is the process of transforming complex, cumbersome, and illiquid assets or rights in the real world into standardized digital certificates. A building, a bond, a fund, a piece of computing power, a membership, and a copyright may all be tokenized in the future. This is the truly sexy aspect of tokenization. 1. Token is not about issuing coins, it's about turning rights into interfaces In the past, tokens were mostly certificates in the scene. You hold casino chips and can only use them in the casino. You have game currency and can only play in the amusement park. They rely on a centralized scenario and also on the credit of the issuer. In the Internet era, Token has become a part of authority and identity. Login verification, API calling, and access authorization all rely on tokens. It may not necessarily be related to money, but it can tell one thing: who you are, what you can access, and what you can do. After the emergence of blockchain, tokens took another step forward and began to become a digital interface for assets and rights. Once a certain right is tokenized, it can be held by wallets, recorded on the chain, invoked by smart contracts, and traded in the market. This means that a Token is not just a symbol, but a right that can flow. So I think many people's understanding of tokenization as "putting assets on the chain" is not accurate enough. A more accurate statement would be: Tokenization is the process of transforming assets and rights into interfaces that can be recognized and processed in the digital world. This is just like the Internet used to make information webpages, and Tokenization used to make value vouchers. 2. AI turns tokens into a new world unit of measurement There is another interesting change in Token that occurs in the field of AI. When we chat with the big model, the model does not directly understand a whole sentence like humans do. It will first break down the text into smaller semantic units, which are called tokens. A sentence, a piece of code, or an article must be tokenized before entering the model. The size of the context window of the model, how much information can be processed at once, and how API calls are charged are all related to the underlying token. So in the AI world, Token is the unit of measurement for machines to understand information. In the Web3 world, Token is the unit of measurement for the transfer of assets and rights. One processes information, the other processes value. These two directions may not seem on the same table, but they may get closer in the future. Because if the AI agent is just chatting, it only needs to understand the information. But if the agent really wants to do things for people, it needs to access data, call services, pay fees, verify identities, execute transactions, and keep records. Agents require interfaces that can be called and units of value that can be settled. At this point, tokenization will become a pathway for AI to enter the real business world. AI is responsible for understanding and decision-making, while Token is responsible for rights confirmation and settlement. One is like a brain, and the other is like an account system. This may be the real thing worth seeing about AI+Crypto. 3. The biggest opportunity is to activate real assets The tokenization that institutions are most concerned about now is not the token itself or AI applications, but RWA, which stands for the tokenization of real assets. Treasury bond, funds, bonds, real estate, gold, artwork, copyright, these traditional assets have a common problem: they are valuable, but not flexible enough. For example, in the past, commercial real estate in a core city could only be traded as a whole, and the participation threshold was very high. But if it is split into many tokens, each representing a portion of the revenue or ownership, the asset granularity will decrease and liquidity will also increase. For example, if a fund is tokenized, its holding, transfer, dividends, and settlement may all be completed through on chain systems and smart contracts. BlackRock's launch of BUIDL is, in a sense, a landmark event in this direction. It's not about the crypto industry going wild, but rather traditional financial giants starting to experiment seriously: can they move traditional financial assets onto the chain. McKinsey also mentioned that tokenized financial assets are moving from pilot projects to scale. The real first to land in the future are often not the most dazzling assets, but those assets that can significantly reduce operating costs and improve settlement efficiency. The real usefulness of tokenization lies not in telling a sexy story, but in making previously cumbersome assets operate faster, more transparent, and automated. 4. It's not a slogan, but a system iteration The biggest problem with tokenization is never just technology. Is it legally recognized in reality that a token on the chain represents a set of property rights? Token has been stolen, who exactly owns the assets? How to synchronize on chain data when the house is broken, the artwork is lost, and the debtor defaults? How can different chains, institutions, and judicial systems recognize each other? These issues are both troublesome and realistic. So tokenization won't be like many crypto narratives that end in a bull market. It is more like a bottom-up system transformation, requiring financial institutions, regulators, laws, and on chain infrastructure to push forward together. In the short term, it may not be as stimulating, but in the long term, it is very important. Because what it wants to change is not a specific product, but the way assets are expressed. In the past, assets operated through contracts, accounts, registration systems, and intermediary processes. In the future, more and more assets may rely on digital certificates, smart contracts, on chain identities, and automated settlements to operate. This is not about turning everything into currency, but about giving more assets the liquidity of the digital age. The information age solves the problem of information circulation, while tokenization aims to solve the problem of value circulation. AI uses tokens to break down language into units that machines can understand. Blockchain uses tokens to turn assets into marketable credentials. Financial institutions may use tokens to transform settlement, authentication, and asset distribution, and future AI agents may also use tokens to complete calls, payments, and transactions. So tokenization is not just a new bottle of old wine in the crypto world, it's more like an underlying language in the digital business world. When assets can be identified by code, when rights can be circulated globally, and when AI can call services and complete payments, tokenization truly begins to change the world.