Capital markets are one of the most important pillars of the modern economy and, in turn, society itself. By facilitating the free flow of capital, these markets make it possible for innovation and progress to take place, creating new financial opportunities for everyone in the process. Not content with democratizing traditional capital markets over the past decades, blockchain and fintech are now looking to radically change them forever.
Traditional capital markets, while more effective than the systems that preceded them, have long struggled to scale up. This was reflected both in terms of accessibility and their application to other types of assets. While the former has now been partially solved by technology, the latter challenge still persists. Not only did legacy approaches make it difficult to achieve the level of “abstraction” required for the effective flow of real-life assets but also to do so in a way that satisfied all interested parties.
This difficulty means that real-world assets like real estate, commodities, and art haven’t benefited from the same level of…