This op-ed by Solana Foundation President Lily Liu originally ran on CoinDesk.
Value is becoming programmable. Lily Liu argues that the Token Supercycle—the long-term migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on internet infrastructure—will change not only how people trade, pay and invest, but what an asset can be.
Markets became electronic, money became digital and finance moved onto the internet. Tokenization, Liu writes, changes the asset itself: making it possible to issue, hold, finance and trade representations of value in markets that never close.
Supercycles restructure markets
Economic supercycles are long-duration shifts in supply, demand and capital allocation that outlast ordinary business cycles. Liu points to China’s industrialization in the early 2000s, as well as earlier periods in the United States, Europe and Japan, as examples.
Tokenization differs because it changes issuance, investment and distribution at the same time and across the globe. Four previously separate developments have converged:
- Stablecoins have shown that money can move onchain at global scale.
- Financial institutions are bringing assets onchain.
- Blockchain infrastructure can support the speed and cost required for real economic activity.
- AI is creating economic actors that need programmable money to operate.
Together, these forces could enable tokens representing anything of value, with clear title, financing and continuous trading.
Issuers: distribution is valuation
Legacy market structures emerged when sharing information and transferring value were both expensive. While those constraints have changed, liquidity remains fragmented across regulatory perimeters and investor check sizes.
Liu argues that tokenization can widen distribution. Assets issued in one jurisdiction may be distributed more broadly and around the clock, while markets designed for institutional-sized allocations can extend to smaller participants at minimal cost.
American depositary receipts (ADRs), which wrap foreign shares for U.S. investors, provide an older example of the underlying mechanism: access to a deeper capital pool can raise the price of identical cash flows. Tokenization applies that model more broadly, without the narrow and costly structure of a depositary bank and sponsor.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in real-world assets traded across Solana in the past year, including tokenized Treasuries, equities and private credit. The New York Stock Exchange, DTCC and the London Stock Exchange are also exploring onchain equity markets.
Investors: universal basic ownership
The same infrastructure can give investors access both to ownership and to finance. It can open markets historically restricted by geography, minimum investment size or accreditation, while making owned assets usable as collateral or income-producing holdings.
Liu calls this goal “universal basic ownership”: enabling anyone with an internet connection to own a piece of what the economy produces and make that ownership productive. In this view, tokenization can put value currently difficult to finance or pledge to work.
Interfaces: any app can be a superapp
Traditional capital markets rely on intermediaries across jurisdictions and asset classes, in part because connecting payment rails, custodians and market venues historically required years of integration. Programmable money can reduce that integration cost to an API call.
That means mobile and web applications can add money and markets to their existing products. Payments, settlement, asset issuance and markets—which have historically operated on separate rails—can increasingly operate on shared programmable infrastructure.
Solana’s low costs and shared liquidity support this convergence, allowing consumer payments, institutional settlement and global markets to operate on one venue. Visa uses Solana for USDC settlement; PayPal brought PYUSD payments and payouts to 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 Solana in the past year. Liu describes a compounding loop: more issuers broaden available assets, asset diversity attracts investors, and greater investor participation can bring deeper liquidity and better pricing. Interfaces expand reach throughout that loop.
AI runs the same loop, faster
AI adds software that can act as an economic agent at scale. With crypto, Liu writes, agents can identify a need, find services, pay for them, consume the results and continue without a human initiating every transaction.
This model of autonomous agentic commerce requires programmable, continuous financial infrastructure. AI can create new issuers through demand for physical capacity such as data centers, energy and production; agents can increasingly allocate capital as investors; and agents can become interfaces themselves.
Once ownership and intent become machine-readable, allocation and settlement can operate at machine speed. Liu argues that institutions that recognize this shift can finance the next wave of physical capacity more efficiently than those that treat tokenization as a curiosity.
Unbounded markets
Onchain volumes remain small relative to traditional markets, and tokenized assets remain small relative to the securities they mirror. Liu compares tokenized Treasuries to the early stage of newspapers moving online: a useful demonstration rather than the endpoint.
With 5.5 billion people connected to the internet, financial infrastructure that can reach them at any hour and with any asset could bring global liquidity online. Every previous capital market was bounded by exchange floors, brokerage relationships, jurisdictions and opening hours; the internet capital market begins to loosen those boundaries.
The system that captures that shift, Liu writes, will not be an upgrade of the old one. It is being built one token at a time.