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This is a segment from the Blockworks Daily newsletter. To read full editions,\u00a0<\/em>subscribe<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThe counterfeit of business is speculation. A man in business always gives value in return for his revenue, and thus performs a useful function.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Andrew Carnegie<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n When asked about the competitive threat posed by newly formed Federal Steel, Andrew Carnegie scoffed that its real specialty was \u201cmanufacturing stock certificates,\u201d not steel.<\/p>\n That dismissive comment was emblematic of the 1890s boom in industrial \u201ctrust\u201d stocks, most of which Carnegie thought had little to do with business and everything to do with speculation.<\/p>\n There were exceptions \u2014 the big monopolistic trusts formed in things like oil, sugar and tobacco unsurprisingly turned out to be good investments.\u00a0<\/p>\n But there were also trusts formed in things like rope, wallpaper and coffins that were essentially stock-promotion schemes that did not.<\/p>\n The 1893 collapse of the National Cordage Company \u2014 the \u201cRope Trust\u201d \u2014 even triggered a widespread financial panic that brought down many other trusts that were similarly in the business of \u201cmanufacturing stock certificates.\u201d<\/p>\n That outcome might be a cautionary tale for crypto, an industry still best known for manufacturing tokens (not value).<\/p>\n The vast majority of those tokens don\u2019t do anything \u2014 and those that do mostly just represent different ways of trading useless tokens.<\/p>\n The crypto market remains highly self-referential like that, but the hope has always been that this would change in time: Build a new financial system and the assets and investors will come.<\/p>\n If so, it feels like they should be arriving any time now \u2014 the technology is now good enough, blockspace is cheap and plentiful enough, and the SEC is in remission.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are hopeful signs that it might be happening.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s a notable boomlet<\/a> of real-world assets moving onchain, for example \u2014 mostly thanks to the success of BlackRock\u2019s tokenized money market fund, BUIDL (a product that is in many ways genuinely superior to its off-chain equivalents).<\/p>\n Stablecoin assets are also trending higher<\/a> and may only be getting started: Mastercard\u2019s announcement<\/a> this morning that it\u2019ll be facilitating payments with stablecoins may be the thing that finally brings crypto to the non-crypto masses.<\/p>\n From levels of $240 billion now, a recent report<\/a> from Citi predicts that stablecoin assets under management will surge to as much as $3.5 trillion by 2030.<\/p>\n (Note: I did the math and found out that 2030 is four and a half years away. <\/em>Shocking, I know, but true.)<\/p>\n If there are anything like 3.5 trillion tokenized dollars onchain, investable assets will follow.\u00a0<\/p>\n I have recently, for example, bought two Pok\u00e9mon cards<\/a> and a bottle of whiskey<\/a> onchain, simply because I had some spare dollars onchain and crypto makes it very easy to buy Pok\u00e9mon cards and bottles of whiskey.<\/p>\n So easy that I now consider both those things investable assets \u2014 not having to either take delivery or store collectibles like that is a game changer.<\/p>\n Investing in cards and bottles is also more fun than making 4% in BUIDL or losing 100% in memecoins.<\/p>\n Hopefully, there will soon be more options for crypto investors to choose from.<\/p>\n Kyle Samani even believes there will be all<\/em> the options: \u201cVirtually all assets will trade on inherently global and permissionless systems like Solana,\u201d he predicted in a recent report<\/a> on the future of crypto capital markets.<\/p>\n If so, that will include stocks and bonds, of course, but also \u2014 and more intriguingly \u2014 all-new kinds of crypto-native assets.<\/p>\n It\u2019s still kind of hard to imagine what these will look like beyond the current offering of blockchain and DeFi tokens \u2014 which are almost all self-referentially leveraged to the trading of crypto.\u00a0<\/p>\n But now that blockspace is so cheap and plentiful, people are trying new things.\u00a0<\/p>\n Time.fun<\/a>, for example, is an experiment in tokenizing people\u2019s time; Zora<\/a> is an experiment in using \u201ccontent coins\u201d to surface and prioritize information; TRUMP, a \u201ccelebrity coin,\u201d is an experiment in tokenizing emoluments; Story Protocol<\/a> is an experiment in programable, tokenized IP; Believe App<\/a> is an experiment that turns X posts into memecoins (or \u201cidea coins\u201d) that offer to fund the business ideas they loosely represent.<\/p>\n Like most experiments, these will probably fail.<\/p>\n But if crypto capital markets keep throwing spaghetti on the wall like this, some new and interesting things should eventually stick.\u00a0<\/p>\n Importantly, they might not all be crypto things, either.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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