Tokenization, as defined by strategy and management consulting firm McKinsey, “is the process of creating a digital representation of a real thing” on a blockchain network—with the underlying goal being to “make assets more accessible.” Blockchain enthusiasts are marketing the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs)—from “art and collectibles to real estate, stocks, commodities, and even personal data”—as “one of the most compelling applications of blockchain technology, revolutionizing how we perceive and interact with various forms of value.”
In this presentation, Goodwin and Webb pull the curtain back on this agenda, explaining that RWAs, carbon credits, and Earth itself are being positioned to become the new dollar debt sink. Key pillars of the “tokenized play” include the land grab—which we described at length in our Plunder report—and the planetwide surveillance and inventorying of assets that makes plunder possible. By way of illustration, Goodwin and Webb discuss the O.N.E. Amazon initiative, which, as they have written, “seeks to turn the Amazon rainforest into a digital asset security to be chopped up, tokenized and sold off to investors around the world as a novel form of digital credit.”