Alex just posted this article on LinkedIn:
The financial world is currently fixated on tokenisation. From “Tokenised Money: Use Cases, Interoperability and Regulation” the 2026 research of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Cambridge Judge Business School to the passage of the GENIUS Act in the United States, the narrative is clear: digitising money is the next evolutionary leap.
But we are falling for a Great Deception — the belief that the future of economic coordination must resemble the past, only faster and more automated.
We are deploying high-efficiency infrastructure to preserve a monetary coordination logic that humanity may already be outgrowing.
Here is why “surface innovation” in tokenised money fails to address the structural storm we are entering.
- The Mirage of Efficiency
The institutional focus, reflected in CCAF research, remains centred on optimising exchange:
24/7 settlement. AI-driven treasury optimisation. Reducing cross-border friction from “5 days and $50” to “5 seconds and 5 cents.”
Technically impressive.
Structurally conservative.
These initiatives prioritise transactional throughput while leaving intact the underlying architecture of a fungible exchange currency acting as universal value proxy.
If the direction is misaligned, acceleration only compresses the failure cycle.
Speed is not transformation.
- Digitising an Obsolete Social Contract
For centuries, money translated:
Effort → Value → Entitlement.
The social contract was legitimised through paid work: You contribute labour. You receive income. Income grants access and dignity.
AI and automation are systematically weakening this link.
Productivity rises. Human labour demand fragments. Yet institutions such as the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund continue modelling economic stability around “full employment.”
Digitising money through CBDCs without redesigning value recognition does not solve this tension.
It digitises an obsolete social contract.
And in doing so, risks:
Automating inequality
Encoding legacy hierarchies into code
Algorithmically enforcing exclusion- Outgrowing the Monetary Monopoly
Money was an extraordinary coordination technology for a world of limited information and weak trust.
Today we operate inside real-time networks.
Value — knowledge, creativity, care, reputation — can be discovered, validated, and circulated directly without always passing through monetary proxies.
In emerging systems, money increasingly functions as a settlement layer, while the “meaning layer” of society operates through networked intelligence.
Yet institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements remain anchored in a monetary worldview, treating alternative value signals as peripheral rather than structural.
The monetary monopoly is not collapsing.
It is being quietly bypassed.
- From Market Choice to Participation in Meaning
Historically, freedom meant market choice — selecting a profession within scarcity constraints.
In The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse imagined a civilisation organised around integration of knowledge rather than accumulation of goods.
We are moving from:
Specialisation under scarcity to Integration under abundance
In an AI-mediated society, freedom becomes the capacity to contribute meaningfully within a shared intelligence network — where value is recognised relationally rather than abstracted into a tokenised deposit.
The Path Forward: Structural Innovation
The future lies in Contribution–Access Networks (CAN) — post-monetary coordination infrastructures that allocate resources based on validated contribution, reliability, and human needs rather than solely monetary accumulation.
The central challenge of the AI era is no longer productivity.
It is coordination with dignity.
If we default to legacy structures, we will construct a digitised hierarchy — efficient, programmable, and exclusionary.
If we redesign our value architectures around participation and coherence, AI becomes a tool for expanding agency rather than compressing it.
Money is not failing.
It is being outgrown.
The question is whether we are ready to build coordination architectures that reflect this new reality.
References
Tokenised Money: Use Cases, Interoperability and Regulation
https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternative-finance/publications/tokenised-money-use-cases-interoperability-and-regulation
The GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, 2025) represents a significant step in formalising federal oversight of stablecoin issuance in the United States, aiming to integrate tokenised private money more directly into the regulated financial system.