As someone who thinks of himself as a “crypto” person, I’ve always found it puzzling that Wall Street — and increasingly, Washington — insists on using the term “digital assets.”
Almost every asset I interact with on a regular basis is digital. I can’t remember the last time I carried cash. All of my personal finances, from bank to brokerage accounts, are digitized. I rarely even use a physical credit card anymore and, based on my interactions with peers, I’m not an outlier.
For most people in the developed world, the only assets that aren’t inherently digital are things like a house or a car. People call these “real assets,” a term that heightens the confusion by presupposing that everything else, from equities and bonds to network tokens and derivatives, is somehow not real. (They are real.)
What I’ve learned though from years of building and investing across the financial tech stack is that most of finance isn’t actually digital in the way we believe it to be. In most of the economy, everything — from media to retail to logistics — has been rebuilt around software. Finance looks similar on the surface, but underneath it has largely been shielded from the digital transformation that mobile and cloud wrought on the global economy.
