Cross-cutting lessons

Fifteen years of history, tens of billions of dollars, dazzling successes and resounding shipwrecks. Once the names and dates are forgotten, a handful of principles remain, found in various forms in every story of the preceding chapters. I have gathered them here into twelve lessons. In my view, they form the practical wisdom of this emerging profession. They hold for the investor evaluating a product, for the regulator overseeing it, and even more for the entrepreneur about to create it.

First lesson. Tokenisation acts as a magnifying glass

The token magnifies what it represents. A quality asset, well managed, becomes more accessible, more transparent and easier to transfer. A mediocre asset, badly managed, becomes a mediocre asset that circulates faster, among a wider public, with more far-reaching consequences. Spiko and RealT used comparable technologies. Their fates were decided by the quality of the asset and of its management.

The practical consequence is immediate. Before judging an RWA project on its technology, one must judge it as one would judge the same project without a blockchain. If the building, the loan or the fund does not merit investment in its traditional form, its tokenised version will merit it no more. Serious investors analyse the lease before looking at the register.