Value is becoming programmable.
Markets transitioned to electronic systems. Currency turned digital. Financial activities moved onto the web. Each of those structural developments altered our trading, payment, and investing methods without modifying the underlying asset itself. This current evolution alters the asset entirely.
The Token Supercycle represents the long-term transition of currency, assets, and ownership toward continuous internet infrastructure. Interpreting this merely as a standard market rally means overlooking the broader transformation.
The internet capital market generated by this trend will ultimately become the largest capital market of all.
Lily Liu serves as the president of the Solana Foundation.
Supercycles Restructure Markets
During the early 2000s, China underwent rapid industrialization, driving commodities into an extended structural surge. Economists designated this a supercycle: a prolonged shift in supply, demand, and capital deployment that outlives typical business cycles. The United States experienced one in the late nineteenth century, while Europe and Japan underwent similar trends during post-war reconstruction.
Those economic shocks originated from a single side and propagated through the system. Tokenization, however, enters from three distinct angles simultaneously. It reshapes issuers, investors, and distributors concurrently on a global scale.
Four separate forces developed independently before converging:
- Stablecoins demonstrated that currency can travel onchain globally.
- Financial institutions are actively bringing assets onchain.
- Blockchain architecture now meets the speed and efficiency thresholds demanded by real economic workflows.
- Artificial intelligence is generating a novel category of economic participants that strictly requires programmable money to operate.
Any one of these developments constitutes a standalone technology cycle, but their convergence creates something entirely different. It ought to be feasible to issue a token for any asset of value, maintain clear title to it, leverage it for financing, and trade it within an unceasing market.
Issuers: Distribution Equals Valuation
Legacy frameworks originated in an era when sharing information and transferring value both involved high friction. Although those constraints have vanished, the market framework they generated remains intact.
Consequently, liquidity stays fragmented. Every market contains exceptional assets that never connect with the capital willing to purchase them, because that capital resides inside a different regulatory perimeter or tier.
Tokenization broadens this aperture. Geography ceases to act as a barrier: an asset issued anywhere can potentially be distributed everywhere instantly and around the clock. Ticket size also stops being a restriction, enabling markets designed for institutional investments to extend toward sub-institutional participants with minimal overhead.
The proof of concept dates back a century. An American Depositary Receipt wraps a foreign stock so that domestic investors can purchase it, and issuers deploy them for a singular reason: access to a deeper liquidity pool elevates the valuation of identical cash flows. Both the mechanism and the justification are well established. The process is simply costly and restrictive, relying on a depositary bank and a sponsor.
Scaling this framework today presents an engineering challenge, which tokenization resolves across any asset class and jurisdiction. Moving forward, distribution equates to valuation.
This transition is already underway. Hundreds of billions of dollars in real-world assets have transacted across Solana over the past year. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries, equities, private credit, and alternative assets are securing distribution and liquidity onchain. These represent early indications that capital can begin functioning more like information: freely mobile and universally accessible.
Market incumbents are actively testing this emerging landscape. The New York Stock Exchange, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, and the London Stock Exchange are all investigating the structure of onchain equity markets.
Investors: Universal Basic Ownership
These same digital rails deliver dual benefits to investors: access to ownership alongside access to financing.
Ownership access opens up markets previously restricted by geography, minimum investment thresholds, or accreditation requirements. Financing access renders owned assets practical: serving as collateral for borrowing purposes or generating yield. A massive proportion of global wealth remains locked in formats that resist financing and cannot be pledged. Tokenization activates this dormant capital.
The ultimate objective is universal basic ownership: any individual with an internet connection can now own a fraction of global economic production and put it to productive use.
Interfaces: Any Application Can Become a Superapp
Traditional capital markets center around intermediaries. Assets reach investors by routing through licensed entities—frequently one per jurisdiction and asset class—with each taking fees for their middleman role. This configuration persisted because historical distribution was genuinely difficult. Moats were regulatory and tied to integration costs, as connecting to legacy payment rails, custodians, and trading venues required years of effort.
Programmable money reduces integration expenses down to an API call. Any mobile or web application can integrate currency and markets directly into its existing functionality. Put differently, any app can evolve into a superapp.
Convergence represents the core narrative here. Payments, transaction settlement, asset issuance, and trading markets—four historically segregated financial sectors—increasingly operate upon unified programmable infrastructure.
Solana’s minimal transaction fees and shared liquidity layer facilitate this convergence. Consumer payments, institutional settlement, and global trading occur within a single venue, permitting liquidity to accumulate and compound across applications rather than remaining isolated across fragmented markets.
This activity has moved past mere experimentation. Visa utilizes Solana for USDC settlement. PayPal introduced PYUSD payments and disbursements onto the network. MoneyGram supplies fiat on- and off-ramps, while Western Union launched its USDPT stablecoin on Solana. Over $4.7 trillion in stablecoins moved across the network during the past year.
Furthermore, these three components reinforce one another: a greater number of issuers increases the immediate availability of assets. Asset variety subsequently attracts investors. Additional investors bring heightened liquidity and superior pricing, which in turn draws more issuers. User interfaces span the entire loop: every new interface expands reach on both fronts, while each new asset provides interfaces with more items to distribute.
AI Operates the Same Loop at Accelerated Speeds
Artificial intelligence accelerates this momentum. AI introduces an element the financial sector has never previously witnessed at scale: software functioning as an autonomous economic agent.
Within crypto environments, agents can evaluate their requirements, identify services, remit payments, consume the deliverables, and proceed independently without requiring human initiation for every single transaction. This unveils a fundamentally distinct type of commerce driven by autonomous agentic workflows. AI supplies the economic actors, whereas blockchain provides the programmable, continuous financial foundation where transactions occur.
Additionally, this multiplies all three foundational pillars. The expansion of AI focuses intense attention on a new cohort of issuers, because the underlying physical infrastructure requires financing, which constitutes entirely new token supply. Agents will act increasingly as independent investors, deploying capital devoid of human intervention. Furthermore, agents will establish themselves as a novel category of interface.
Once ownership and transactional intent become machine-readable, allocation and settlement execute at machine speed. Energy grids and payment systems abandon geographic silos in favor of shared infrastructure. Near-zero-cost transactions displace percentage-plus fee networks, while around-the-clock trading replaces fixed operating windows.
Institutions that recognize this reality will finance the upcoming wave of physical capacity—including data centers, power generation, and production facilities—far more effectively than competitors viewing tokenization as a mere novelty.
Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2026/09/02/the-token-supercycle-everything-of-value-is-becoming-programmable.
