Value is becoming programmable.
Markets went electronic. Money went digital. Finance moved onto the internet. Each of those shifts changed how we trade, pay and invest without changing what an asset is. This one changes the asset.
The Token Supercycle is the long-term migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on internet infrastructure. Read it merely as a market rally, and you will miss the larger transformation.
The internet capital market it produces will become the largest capital market.
Supercycles restructure markets
In the early 2000s, China industrialized fast enough to push commodities into a multi-year structural boom. Economists called it a supercycle: a long-duration shift in supply, demand and capital allocation that outlasts ordinary business cycles. The US had one in the late 1800s; Europe and Japan in post-war reconstruction.
Those shocks entered the market from one side and worked through it. Tokenization enters from three. It changes who can issue, who can invest and who can distribute, at the same time, across the globe.
Four forces developed on separate tracks and have now converged:
- Stablecoins proved money can move onchain at a global scale.
- Financial institutions are bringing assets onchain.
- Blockchain infrastructure can now support the speed and cost that real economic activity requires.
- AI is producing a new class of economic actors that needs programmable money to function at all.
Any one of them is a technology cycle, but together they are something else. It should be possible to issue a token for anything of value. To hold a clear title to it. To finance against it. And to trade it in a market that never closes.
Issuers: distribution is valuation
Legacy systems were designed when information sharing and value transfer were both high friction. Both constraints are gone, but the market structure they produced is still here.
As a result, liquidity is fragmented. There are excellent assets in every market that never reach the capital willing to own them, because that capital sits in a different regulatory perimeter or a different size bracket.
Tokenization opens the aperture. Geography stops being a gate: an asset issued anywhere has the potential to be distributed everywhere, instantly, at any hour. Check size stops being a gate, too, as markets built for institutional tickets can now extend into sub-institutional ones with minimal cost.
The proof of concept is a century old. An ADR wraps a foreign share so US investors can buy it, and issuers have used them for one reason: access to a deeper pool of capital raises the price of identical cash flows. The mechanism and rationale are established. It is simply expensive and narrow, requiring a depositary bank and a sponsor.
Scaling this today is a technology problem. Tokenization solves it: any asset, any jurisdiction. Going forward, distribution becomes valuation.
This is already underway. Hundreds of billions in real-world assets have traded across Solana in the past year. Tokenized Treasuries, equities, private credit and other assets are finding distribution and liquidity onchain. These are early signs that capital can behave more like information: free-moving and always available.
The incumbents are already testing this new ground. The New York Stock Exchange, DTCC and the London Stock Exchange are all exploring what onchain equity markets look like.
Investors: universal basic ownership
The same rails deliver two things to investors: access to ownership and access to finance.
Access to ownership opens markets that were closed by geography, minimum size or accreditation. Access to finance makes an owned asset usable: collateral to borrow against, or a holding that earns. An enormous share of the world's value sits in forms that are hard to finance and impossible to pledge. Tokenization puts that idle wealth to work.
Call the goal universal basic ownership: anyone with an internet connection can now own a piece of what the economy produces, and make it productive.
Interfaces: any app can be a superapp
Traditional capital markets are organized around intermediaries. An asset reaches an investor by passing through licensed parties — often one per jurisdiction and asset class — each taking a fee for standing in the middle. That structure exists because distribution used to be genuinely hard. The moat was regulatory, and it was also the cost of integration — connecting to payment rails, custodians and market venues took years.
Programmable money collapses the integration cost to an API call. Any app, mobile or web, can add money and markets to what it already does. In other words, any app can be a superapp.
Convergence is the real story here. Payments, settlement, asset issuance and markets, four activities that historically lived on separate financial rails, increasingly operate on the same programmable infrastructure.
Solana's low costs and shared liquidity make that convergence possible. Consumer payments, institutional settlement and global markets operate on one venue, allowing liquidity to deepen and compound across use cases rather than fragment across separate markets.
This is already moving beyond experimentation. Visa uses Solana for USDC settlement. PayPal brought PYUSD payments and payouts onto the network. MoneyGram provides on- and off-ramps, and Western Union launched its USDPT stablecoin on Solana. More than $4.7 trillion in stablecoins moved across the network in the past year.
And the three sides compound: More issuers deepen the instant availability of assets. Asset diversity attracts investors. More investors bring more liquidity and better pricing, which attracts issuers. Interfaces sit across the whole loop: every new interface widens reach on both sides, and every new asset gives interfaces more to distribute.
AI runs the same loop, faster
AI accelerates this. AI creates something the financial system has never had at scale: software that acts as an economic agent.
With crypto, agents can decide what they need, seek out services, pay for them, consume the results, and move on, all without a human initiating each transaction. That opens the door to a fundamentally different kind of economy, driven by autonomous agentic commerce. AI supplies the economic agents, while blockchain serves the programmable, non-stop financial layer where they transact.
And it multiplies all three sides. The AI buildout brings hyperfocus to a new set of issuers, because the physical capacity behind it needs financing, and that financing is net new supply. Agents will act increasingly as autonomous investors, allocating capital with no human in the loop. Agents will also become a new interface themselves.
Once ownership and intent are machine-readable, allocation and settlement run at machine speed. Energy markets and payment rails stop living in geographic silos and start running on shared infrastructure. Near-zero-cost payments replace percentage-plus-fee networks. Round-the-clock markets replace trading windows.
The institutions that grasp this will finance the next wave of physical capacity (data centers, energy, production) more efficiently than those treating tokenization as a curiosity.
We are in the early innings
Onchain volumes are still small against traditional markets. Tokenized assets remain a rounding error next to the securities they mirror. This is both a fair description of where we are today, but a poor prediction of where this goes.
The internet made information nearly free to create and distribute. What followed was not newspapers online. It was entire markets and business models with no prior analogue. Tokenized Treasuries are the newspapers-online phase: a useful demonstration, but also not the endpoint. Five and a half billion people are connected to the internet. Financial infrastructure that can reach all of them, at any hour, with any asset, brings the biggest market of all — the market for money — to fingertip access. Putting global liquidity online is too strong a gravitational pull to resist.
Unbounded markets
Every capital market to date has been bounded by who could get in: exchange floors, brokerage relationships, jurisdictions and opening hours. The internet capital market begins to loosen those boundaries.
The system that captures that shift will not be an upgrade of the old one. It is being built now, one token at a time.
This op-ed by Solana Foundation President Lily Liu originally ran on CoinDesk.