Would A Tokenized World Change How We See Value?
Patrick Lee, CEO of Boogle Group
Traditional assets, like stocks, bonds, property, and land, stay beyond the reach of majority of the world’s population because managing such assets is a laborious process. There are too many middlemen involved- state bodies and regulators, what have you. The end result is a process which is expensive, involving complex legal agreement and tonnes of paperwork. It becomes slow and lacks enough transparency to prevent fraud.
This is why I’m excited for the possibilities of tokenization.
Tokenization is the act of converting real-world or digital assets into a token coded with its own contract requirements and rules, offering a new way of thinking about managing assets, while doing away with the expensive middleman.
Taking an asset and representing it in many small parts or tokens, is like a digital receipt for a slice of that asset. Unlike paper, these receipts are forever logged on the blockchain.
With blockchain, essentially everything can be tokenized. Tokens and blockchains become a way to track ownership of anything. This is how you can build very interesting and compelling incentive systems. Unlike cryptocurrencies, tokens have various potential use cases — anything from managing property, shares, and contracts to powering decentralized applications and games.
In general, there are two types of tokens: Utility tokens and security tokens. I’d like to focus more on utility tokens.
These are digital assets that give their owners access to products or services produced by a company. These tokens are meant to be used, rather than held or traded. A utility token can provide access to a future service, such as renting computing power, casting a legally binding vote, or purchasing a product. At Boogle, we have plans for BOO tokens to be utilised in the advertising industry, to monetise the attention of our search engine users. We have bigger and bolder plans for the utility of BOO tokens so that there will be more utility for it. The utility of BOO tokens will be based around the utility of Boogle’s products, which makes us different from previous cryptocurrency projects.
Government support and cooperation is crucial.
The rules that govern blockchains can get complicated and the networks are not immune to its own forms of bureaucracy. Adding to that, regulators around the world are paying close attention to the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. Each country will vary in the sale, distribution, and management of tokenised assets. Nevertheless, US regulators have shown signs of warming up to this. China as well has announced plans to increase investment to support blockchain technology. Support from governments in any way at all is crucial to allow entrepreneurs in this space to experiment. There is so much experimentation to be done to build this world
The Future
Tokenization promises a world where almost any asset or service can be represented and stored on a blockchain in a transparent way. The possibilities are theoretically endless. We see the vision in our minds but getting there will take a lot of work and elbow grease. People do get impatient on how long it will take to reach there but we need to look back to a similar point in time in the past. The climate around the world when it comes to blockchain and tokens right now feels like the early days of the Internet, when we were just beginning to understand the ideas best suited to this technology. It’s taken around 30 years for the internet to get to where it is today. Blockchain has only been around for 10 years.
It’s just the beginning for all blockchain startups tokenizing traditional assets. We’re only in the transition phase. But we hope it will build a world where transactions and ownership of valuable assets can become transparent, frictionless, and more equitable.
Follow more of our CEO’s thoughts on his LinkedIn.
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