Value exchange has always rested on a simple principle: voluntary participation creates positive-sum outcomes. That was true in ancient barter and remains true in today’s digital networks. What has changed is our capacity to coordinate these win–win interactions.
This is an edited transcript of my remarks at Token Talks & Tastes 2.0 for the panel “From Camels to Code: The Evolution of Value Exchange.”
For most of human history, conflict was the default because aligning interests across tribes, cities, or nations was extraordinarily hard. Modern technology flipped that condition. We can now build local and global systems engineered to produce shared gains rather than avoid losses. Digitization was only the first layer. Programmable value—enabled by blockchains, cryptography, and autonomous protocols—turns cooperation itself into a technical property.
The modern era of digital value began in the 1990s under peculiar constraints. Strong encryption was treated as a weapon, export-restricted, and deliberately weakened in U.S. software. But mathematics is indifferent to borders. Switzerland issued software with uncrippled cryptography, and the asymmetry became obvious. Bitcoin completed the shift. It transformed strong encryption from a theoretical right into a practical economic force. Early adopters experimented by sending free Bitcoin around simply to demonstrate peer-to-peer value transfer without intermediaries. Many dismissed it: too early, too strange, or later “too late” as the price rose. Yet the world still hasn’t fully absorbed the implications: a cryptographically secured global settlement layer outside the control of any single nation.
The most revealing examples of sovereign digital payments come not from Silicon Valley but from Kenya and India. Buying sugarcane for fifty cents on a dusty road using M-Pesa, or bananas in Mumbai for fifty rupees via UPI, illustrates systems unconstrained by the aging credit-card rails that dominate the West. As countries debate sovereign AI and sovereign cloud, they must also confront the need for sovereign value infrastructure. Ironically, the United States spent a decade protecting incumbents at the expense of future crypto innovation before reversing course and moving toward Bitcoin as a strategic asset class. Anyone questioning the long-term trajectory of cryptographic value should look closely at that reversal.
This shift opens the path to tokenization. Skepticism is familiar: after the dot-com crash, critics declared the internet a fad, even though Amazon already existed. Today, NFTs are mocked as frivolous images, yet the underlying capability—assigning digital representation and transferability to assets that lacked it—is foundational. With the NASDAQ and NYSE preparing tokenized equity listings, the competitive landscape is changing. New entrants can redefine participation models; incumbents must adapt. The deeper consequence is a widening of the risk-reward frontier that historically excluded most people.
Tokenized real estate exemplifies this shift. Fractional ownership allows students, young workers, and others priced out of traditional markets to participate in wealth creation. But regulation lags. In the U.S., if you’re not wealthy, you are legally barred from investing in many high-growth opportunities—an inversion of fairness that assumes those without wealth cannot make informed decisions. A world with programmable value cannot be governed by frameworks that entrench structural inequality.
Regulation has repeatedly throttled emerging technologies. Napster’s shutdown is an instructive case: a nascent peer-to-peer network that might have evolved into a decentralized media layer was crushed before it could mature. The pattern repeated across crypto, where innovators moved from Switzerland to Malta to Singapore to Dubai, using regulatory arbitrage to force competition among jurisdictions. But unlike the early internet, we cannot wait twenty years for society to organically adapt. Digital natives emerged naturally. AI natives will not. The curiosity, adaptability, and risk appetite that children demonstrate must be rekindled across institutions if we want to remain competitive in crypto, AI, and every frontier technology.
As AI and automation increasingly decouple human labor from economic output, the social contract must evolve. We need to recognize human value independently of productivity. Universal basic income becomes the most straightforward expression of that principle. Emerging systems even experiment with verifying existence to earn cryptocurrency—an early exploration of identity and economic rights beyond labor. Autonomous AI agents and robotics will shrink the role of human labor dramatically. If governments do not adapt, dignity and stability will erode.
Looking ahead, the coming decades may bring radical longevity, disease reduction, and material abundance. Heavy industry may move off-planet. Nations could become greener and more stable. But abundance introduces new psychological constraints: the paralysis of infinite choice, the difficulty of navigating meaning when scarcity is no longer the primary organizing force. Even in a world of solved problems, humans will face new and demanding challenges.
AI systems themselves will need native payment infrastructure. The internet has included an error code—402: Payment Required—since 1994, anticipating digital-native settlement layers that never fully emerged. Asking whether AI should use credit cards is meaningless. Cryptographic payment rails are the only architecture suitable for autonomous agents. Coinbase underscored this reality with its X402 protocol—machine-to-machine payments designed for an AI-native economy.
Finally, as technology moves into the body, society will confront the boundaries of human adaptability. A decade ago, implanting a chip to store a private key or pay for coffee was seen as a radical experiment. Many still recoil. These reactions reveal each person’s adaptation threshold—the point at which technological integration feels unacceptable. Whether implants remain in hands or one day reach the brain, a future where 50–60% of the population reaches their threshold will force collective negotiation of what progress looks like. The limits we set individually today foreshadow the boundaries society will confront tomorrow.
We are rebuilding the architecture of value, governance, and purpose. Cryptography, sovereignty, tokenization, and AI are not isolated innovations; they are components of a coherent transformation. The challenge ahead is mostly psychological, regulatory, and ethical. We must decide not only how to build this new infrastructure, but what kind of future we want it to serve.