bits from mc

Larry Fink on tokenisation

When Larry Fink is talking about the tokenisation of real-world assets in The Economist, the game has changed.

I tried to push this idea a few times over the years but met resistance and a Sisyphean climb of regulatory barriers.

On the entrepreneurial level, I didn’t want to spend most of my time—and cash, as a bootstrapper—navigating legal grey areas. The VCs I approached had deployed capital into startups that were attempting to solve this through (a) credit and (b) sub-advisors, both of which seemed fraught with complications.

Ironically, compliance wasn’t the blocker. The KYC bits are relatively easy if you control onboarding to the protocol and vet the recipients of capital.

The real ‘problem to be solved’ was finding a fix for the ‘oracle’ problem: connecting real-world business activities (inputs to the income statement and balance sheet) to the chain reliably. That remains the hard problem.

The weight of BlackRock should accelerate tokenised funding of offchain (‘real-world’) businesses. I am excited to see how this expands access to capital for the world’s entrepreneurs—especially the underserved.

Crypto is full of scams and bad actors. But the rails it provides for the creation and exchange of value globally are real.

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