“We are moving towards a tokenized economy,” declared Roberto Campos Neto, head of Banco Central do Brasil. For the next 30 mins, sitting amongst the Blockchain Rio audience in Rio de Janeiro, I listened as Mr. Campos Neto delivered a masterclass on redefining economic potential. His words weren't just a statement but a vision of the economic future—one that's already unfolding.

What is a “tokenized economy”?

In a conference speech in August 2022, Mr. Campos Neto defined a tokenized economy as one where "We are leaving a world based on accounts to a world based on tokens.” In his farewell address from Dec 2024, he went further, “In fact, the financial world of the future is a tokenized world, which is different. Tokenization is not a digitalization with a centralized system, it is a tokenized system of platforms where we can do things, do business, where customers can interact with each other.” 

In a presentation from October 2024, Mr. Campos Neto explained how to achieve this broader vision - by building programmability, interoperability, and composability directly into the financial system. This vision is similar to the BIS’ “Finternet” and in the same spirit as the India Stack, India’s own successful initiative to redefine its digital economic primitives. 

To me, this is the equivalent of the full software-ization of finance. Tokens representing the raw ingredients for economic activity (stores of value, assets, identification, documentation, etc.), linked by shared databases and networks, programmable by default. New primitives that can massively reduce the effort to coordinate and transact, unlocking a new tier of economic activities that is unviable today. 

New primitives, new systems 

Paint points around transacting and coordinating economic activity have existed since the beginning of human civilization. The tools available to us at a given point in time have set our constraints, with systems then designed to optimize trade-offs according to specific goals. In the last 75 years, from the then-new primitive of digitized financial accounts as financial data moved from paper “databases” to computer databases, we built major global systems such as card networks, SWIFT, and digital wallets, re-defining financial experiences and underpinning today’s globalized and digitized economy.

The new primitives from tokenization give us the next major opportunity to redefine our financial and economic systems. Leaps in progress won’t come from incremental improvements, but instead from fundamentally redesigned systems. Shipping was revolutionized not by loading and unloading crates faster, but by implementing containerization and creating a new standard for end-to-end cargo portability. The real productive value of electrification manifested not by simply replacing steam power, but by restructuring factory production no longer constrained to organizing around a centralized energy source. In a similar vein, the opportunity today is not to just start using tokenization within existing systems, but also to redesign and build new systems that are tokenization-native. 

Stablecoins provide a perfect case study. Linking stablecoins such as USDC with the existing financial system is immediately helpful in addressing major pain points around scarce dollar liquidity and slow global transfers. However, this primitive on a blockchain can do so much more - programmable, 24/7, real-time money movement can redefine foreign exchange market efficiency and smoothen out business cashflows. Once linked up with capital markets via tokenized assets, capital utilization and investment optionality is maximized. Imagine having a business treasury that is always yielding on an optimal basket of global assets until the second it is transferred to make a business payment, which is automatically triggered once a smart contract’s conditions are met at near mid-market FX rate costs stemming from deep, global liquidity pools on-chain. The only real blocker to this level of global capital efficiency is our ingenuity and collaboration in redesigning systems around the new primitives for users and broader society.  

Building in a tokenizing world

Tokenization is in its early stages, with stablecoins quickly becoming one of the most salient examples of its benefits. The growth of crypto assets like Bitcoin, the development of NFTs and DeFi, and the rise of specialized blockchains and tokenized securities all indicate the space is growing apace, with the quickly emerging regulatory guidance around the world only helping to create clarity and incentivize further investment.

What can’t be forgotten as the world tokenizes is that these innovations represent new tools to better resolve paint points for society and users. I really like Matt Brown’s blog explaining how B2B payments are workflows, highlighting how payments themselves are part of a bigger context. The benefits of tokenization will not stop at the transaction itself - if we build properly, new systems should improve the entire lifecycle of business decisions driving capital efficiency.

Today’s economic systems, especially in emerging markets, are riddled with friction stemming from fragmentation, information asymmetry, and inaccessibility, generating an implicit tax on economic activity. Tokenization-native systems, when embedded within interoperable platforms steeped in the nuances of the ecosystems they serve and supercharged with developments in open finance, artificial intelligence (like AI agents), and digital governance, have endless combinatorial economic potential.