All Property Becomes Cryptography
For 99%+ of what's valuable, for every financial asset and capital asset, we will secure it onchain.
All property becomes cryptography.
Let me explain why.
First, right now, trillions of dollars worth of digital gold is secured onchain. Bitcoin is now valued everywhere there is an internet connection. And no matter what political faction you're in, everyone agrees on the raw fact of who owns what amount of BTC.
Next, right now, the full legalization of stablecoins means that every other asset goes onchain. Because if there is a legal status for onchain currency, of course there's a legal path for onchain stocks, onchain bonds, and every other type of financial asset.
So, that's a lot right there. But there's actually a next step. As you can see from the video below, this door can also be secured with an onchain smart lock. That means the door to your house can be secured by crypto. So can the door to your car.
From Hideyoshi Moriya: My home also can be unlocked with Ethereum, by verifying a NFT (ENS) ownership. In this example, the system verifies if I have an ownership of piyo.eth @ensdomains.
Indeed, any door can be secured in this way. The door to a plane, to a train, to a boat, to a building. Any door can be secured onchain.
But this is really more than the keys to your car door. It's really the keys to your car itself. The digital signature starts the engine. And that means any piece of capital equipment, from cranes to drones can be similarly secured.
That includes the humanoid robots, the sidewalk robots, the self-driving cars, and just about anything that's controlled electronically. Which is almost everything.
There are exceptions. The food on your plate, the shirt on your back, those can't and won't be secured onchain. But that's actually a negligible fraction of value in the world.
For everything else, for 99%+ of what's valuable, for every financial asset and every capital asset, we will secure it onchain.
And the reason we'll have to do that is that the blockchain is the only truly secure backend. The Pentagon gets repeatedly hacked, as do many web2 services, but scaled public blockchains do not.
So: even the control plane for the drones goes onchain. The blockchain is the basis by which we can build a code-based order on the Internet, a new kind of global economic union that allows anyone with an internet connection to access world-class monetary policy and contractual equality.
All property becomes cryptography.
This post originally appeared on X. See comments here.
Balaji, I want to be on board with this. Truly. But I have to be honest: I have some serious reservations.
There’s a clarity to your vision that’s undeniably compelling, but it also feels, at times, too neat. Too clean. It carries the scent of High Modernism, with its promise of total legibility and systemic elegance. And like all High Modernist architectures, it risks collapsing into a Ballardian dystopia (see Super-Cannes, one of his sharpest).
So yes: you’re right that cryptographic control of capital assets is coming. That part is nearly inevitable. But I’m worried you’re skipping over some deeper structural truths. I don’t raise these as gotchas. I’d genuinely welcome your perspective if I’m missing something.
Here are my core concerns:
1. Enforcement is not the same as legitimacy. The latter is messy, emergent, and computationally irreducible. It requires more than protocol adherence: it requires social trust, historical context, and moral weight.
2. Protocols don’t eliminate coercion, they obscure it. Code may execute deterministically, but the choice of what gets encoded is political. Who interprets edge cases? Who operates at the “sharp end” of protocol enforcement if not humans?
3. Coherence doesn’t emerge from code, it emerges from context. We live in a computationally irreducible universe (per Stephen Wolfram). You can’t shortcut your way to meaning by scaling enforcement. The more totalizing the system, the more brittle its failures.
In Decentralization and Its Discontents I explore how systems of control mutate as they decentralize. I suspect you’ll find the critique familiar, and perhaps worth wrestling with, especially if you’ve read Venkatesh Rao’s deep dives on decentralization as a metatribe. [If not, he’s on here and worth engaging with.]
I don’t need to be right for the sake of it. But I do think we need more debate at this level of depth: not just about what crypto can do, but about what it means.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
https://open.substack.com/pub/theliminallens/p/crypto-decentralization-belief-engine?r=dvftt&utm_medium=ios
Great articulation of what’s to come. Tokenization of everything will require a lot of semiconductors and a lot of electricity!