A vision

This book opened with clay tablets. Five thousand years ago, in Mesopotamia, scribes recorded who owed what to whom, which plot belonged to which family, how many measures of barley the temple had received. The register was born with the city. Since then it has changed its medium, clay, parchment, paper, magnetic tape, the database. It has changed its keepers, the temple, the notary, the bank, the central securities depository. It has always performed the same function, that of making trust possible between people who do not know each other.

Tokenisation is the most recent chapter of this long history. At the end of this book, I would like to say what I expect of it, what I fear from it, and what I believe it can become. These are convictions. Everyone is free not to share them.

What I believe

I believe first that tokenisation acts as a magnifying glass. I wrote it in the foreword, and every chapter has confirmed it. It magnifies the quality of management, and it magnifies its faults. It makes a good, well-managed building more accessible, and a neglected building more visible. It serves the value that competent women and men have been able to create, or it exposes more quickly the value they have destroyed. This conviction has led me to judge each project as I would judge it without a blockchain, before looking at its technology.