During this year’s iConnections Global Alts, the world’s largest capital introduction event for the alternative investment industry, Chainlink Labs’ Head of Tokenization, Colin Cunningham, sat down with Galaxy’s Sam Englebardt and ParaFi Capital’s Joshua Solesburt to discuss how stablecoin adoption accelerates real-world asset tokenization, which sets the foundation for transforming global markets with adjacent technology like AI.
Solesburt outlined five core tenants of tokenized assets – atomic settlement, efficiency, programmability, auditability, and sovereignty – that make them superior to traditional assets.
“What’s changed recently is regulation,” he said.
Last year, the GENIUS Act established the first federal guardrails for US dollar-pegged stablecoins. The legislation was hailed as a definitive victory in accelerating the adoption of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, for which Chainlink provides the most comprehensive and widely used oracle infrastructure.
Last week, the SEC issued an interpretation clarifying how federal securities laws apply to different digital assets and transactions involving digital assets.
“This to me is what’s opened up the aperture for firms to really engage in tokenization,” Solesburt explained.
Englebardt underscored democratization as one of the first and most enduring promises of tokenization.
“This is the idea that everybody should have access to the types of investments and assets that, at the moment, a relatively small class of people have access to,” he said.
At the same time, programmable money and digital assets would most likely become the domain of AI.
“As you start to think about how these transactions are going to be happening, and the decisions being made, and the speed at which they’re going to be made – this is all stuff that is absolutely essential for us to even begin to optimize anything that AI will eventually be able to do for us agentically,” Englebardt explained.
“What tokenization effectively does is it lowers the barrier to financial asset creation and distribution,” added Solesburt.
“Tokenization is going to create an exponential increase in assets. We don’t have the bandwidth as humans to deal with it.”
He described a race to the bottom in which AI agents will find the most cost-effective ways to move money.
“It’s going to end up being stablecoins. And then from stablecoins, you have tokenized dollars. It’s very easy to then expand to tokenized assets. So I think it actually is, in many ways, the best thing to happen to the blockchain space.”
Watch the full conversation.