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Shared intelligence for next-generation economic infrastructure.

The Intelligence Economy Institute brings together research, analytical tools, institutional expertise, and cross-sector collaboration, helping its members navigate complexity, identify opportunities, and help shape the infrastructures and rules of the intelligence economy.

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Where the Institute’s research becomes an instrument.

Members work with practical instruments rather than commentary: concrete tools that apply the Institute’s research to the decisions in front of them.

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The Tokenization Monitor

Live market intelligence on how the world’s financial institutions are actually adopting tokenization, scored across ten dimensions and tracked signal by signal, with a briefing on every run explaining what moved and why.

  • Evidence-graded 0 to 100 scores with confidence intervals
  • Leaderboards, institution profiles and country cards
  • Score history and Movers, updated as the market shifts
  • A weekly members-only briefing
Latest briefing

London Stock Exchange Draws a Line Between Tokens and Shareholder Rights

The London Stock Exchange said it is assessing a UK tokenized-equity structure designed to preserve shareholder rights, governance and investor protections, with settlement through the LSEG Digital Securities Depository and a distribution partnership with Payward, Kraken's owner, that would list xStocks on the planned LSE 24 venue in 2027. The week's most concrete transaction came from Toronto-Dominion, which moved real US-dollar funds between its New York branch and TD Bank, N.A. with BNY as clearing intermediary, settled atomically with tokenized money on the Project Agorá platform. HashKey joined DTCC's digital-assets working group ahead of an October 2026 tokenization service, and Dubai's VARA signed an MOU with Securitize. The common thread is a contest over who controls the authoritative record, the settlement asset and the route to the investor. An exchange plan is not an admitted security, one real-value payment is not a network, a working-group seat is not integration and an MOU is not approval.

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Latest

Publications & research

Original articles, reports, and a curated stream of external writing, threads, and resources from across the field.

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IEI Article

Georgia's Next Digital-Money Opportunity: Tokenized Bank Deposits

A bank-led model could add programmability and atomic settlement without disintermediating Georgia's banking system. Tokenized commercial-bank deposits would not replace the lari, commercial banks or central-bank settlement: properly designed, the token remains a liability of a licensed bank and a claim held by its customer, represented on programmable infrastructure so money and assets can move together under predefined conditions. Georgia already has much of the foundation, from the National Bank's deposit-tokenization sandbox to open finance and instant payments. The next step is a common rulebook and a real multi-bank transaction.

10 min read

Members
IEI Article

The most important appointment in a tokenized fund launch is the transfer agent

Asset managers tend to begin tokenization projects with a technology question: which blockchain should we use? They may be starting in the wrong place. The decisive design choice is not where the token lives, but where ownership legally lives, who keeps that record, and who has the authority to correct it when the technology stops matching legal reality.

11 min read

IEI Article

Digital Assets Have Standards. What They Lack Is an Architecture.

Tokenization is usually described as a technology transition. For institutions it is a standards-integration problem: a bond, fund, derivative or collateral position is dependable only when its legal rights, economic terms, identifiers, messages, ledger controls, custody and settlement stay aligned through issuance, trading, servicing, default and exit. Drawing on the IEI report Standards for Digital Assets, this article argues the market has enough standards and lacks an architecture to compose them, sets out the four truths (legal, economic, operational, ledger) every instrument must keep aligned, and introduces the Digital Assets Standards Lab launching in September 2026.

32 min read

X

The Intelligence Economy

The essay argues that intelligence has become an industrial commodity: cognition manufactured from electricity, metered by the token, and shipped at the speed of light. When a technology company finances the restart of a retired nuclear plant to lock in twenty years of power, the economics start to resemble heavy industry more than software, with a capital bill running into the trillions. The piece then asks who ultimately carries that cost, and makes the case that the burden most likely falls on labor.

Members
Report

Fund Tokenization Plumbing

This report treats tokenized investment funds as a problem of fund plumbing rather than a problem of cryptography. Its central claim is that the value and the risk of fund tokenization lie in the interaction between legal ownership, transfer agency, fund administration, custody, settlement, investor eligibility, regulatory compliance, tax reporting, net asset value, liquidity, secondary transfers, and collateral use. Every tokenized model is tested against fund law, securities law, transfer-agent obligations, operational reality, investor protection, anti-money-laundering and sanctions controls, tax, accounting, custody, cybersecurity, market structure, and liquidity constraints, and each is compared with the best available non-tokenized alternative. Part I builds the foundations: what a tokenized fund actually is, an operating-model taxonomy, and the technology architecture that follows from the model. Part II works through fund types, from money market and short-duration bond funds to private debt, private equity, hedge funds and liquid alternatives, real estate and infrastructure, ETFs and fund-of-funds. Later parts cover the transfer-agent control framework, the liquidity, net asset value and settlement constraints that bind every tokenized fund, custody and private-key risk, the cash leg of tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins and central-bank money, a risk taxonomy and control framework, an operating-cost model, and a constraints-and-solutions catalogue that separates solvable frictions from inherent limits. It is written for fund counsel, regulators, transfer agents, administrators, custodians, auditors, asset managers, institutional investors, and the operating teams that must build and supervise tokenized fund products.

IEI Article

Tokenization's Next Bottleneck Is Economics, Not Technology

The technical question, whether financial assets, money and market processes can run on shared digital infrastructure, has largely been answered. The economic one has not. The Intelligence Economy Institute is developing the Tokenization Economics Lab, an analytical and management environment for understanding where tokenization creates value, how that value is distributed, and what it takes to move from experimentation to sustainable operation.

8 min read

Areas of focus

Where the infrastructure has to be built

01

Economic Infrastructure

Markets, pricing, and settlement systems for autonomous and agentic economic activity.

02

Financial Systems

Capital formation, payments, and risk frameworks as AI reshapes intermediation.

03

Governance & Standards

Accountability, auditability, and the institutional rules that keep AI markets legible.

04

Tokenization & Settlement

Programmable assets and verifiable settlement, the connective tissue between AI systems and real-world value.

Partners & Contributors

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The Institute convenes and collaborates with public institutions, financial-market infrastructures, universities, and standards bodies advancing the intelligence economy.

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