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Building the economic infrastructure for the age of artificial intelligence.

The Intelligence Economy Institute advances the economic, financial, and governance infrastructures that the intelligence economy will require — convening finance institutions, regulators, researchers, and technologists around evidence, not hype.

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Selected work

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Working Paper

The Trillion-Dollar Proof

Tokenization is no longer a thesis but a migration: with on-chain real-world assets at roughly $20–22 billion today and sell-side projections running from Citi's $5.5 trillion to as much as $30 trillion by 2030, the value whose safety depends on smart-contract logic is set to climb by about three orders of magnitude — even as the security record of the rails remains poor. This working paper surveys the formal-verification tooling landscape for tokenized finance and argues that securing it at scale requires two layers that blockchain security is still missing.

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GitHub

Defining AI Agents: An Ontological and Topological Framework for Organizational Systems

An architectural framework using explicit, machine-readable ontological and topological representations for AI agents — addressing the scalability and governance gap caused by the absence of a common, semantically expressive, structurally adaptive abstraction layer.

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The Map We Never Had

Why a shared language of correctness may matter more than any single tool — and what the Blockchain Property Ontology is trying to build.

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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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Defining AI Agents: Why Meaning and Structure Must Be Written Down

A plain-language companion to the IEI paper Defining AI Agents — why agentic systems need an explicit, machine-readable account of meaning (ontology) and structure (topology), written down rather than left implicit, if they are to scale and stay governable.

Note

Regulating Decentralised Finance in the European Union

A compte rendu and analysis of a closed-door, non-attribution roundtable held in May 2026 — convening regulators, supervisors, legal practitioners, academics, exchange operators, protocol builders, and policy specialists around the European Commission's consultation on decentralised finance (DeFi), launched ahead of the mandatory review of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). The discussion converged on several structuring findings: that the threshold question is not how to regulate DeFi but whether identified risks justify regulation at all, and that "sufficient decentralisation" remains undefined and would benefit from sharper analytical tools.

Members
Technical Report

Settlement Plumbing

A systematic, operational account of how trades become final, irrevocable transfers of value across financial markets and payment systems. "Settlement plumbing" denotes the layered set of institutions, accounts, contracts, messages, and risk controls — clearing, payment, and securities settlement — through which an agreement to exchange value is transformed into settled obligations. Prepared for institutional readers, regulators, infrastructure providers, banks, market makers, and tokenization researchers, it covers institutions, accounts, messages, money, collateral, netting, finality, and failure.

GitHub

Defining AI Agents: An Ontological and Topological Framework for Organizational Systems

An architectural framework using explicit, machine-readable ontological and topological representations for AI agents — addressing the scalability and governance gap caused by the absence of a common, semantically expressive, structurally adaptive abstraction layer.

Note

Digital Assets: the Future of Finance?

An analysis of the "Digital Assets: the Future of Finance?" plenary roundtable convened at the Paris Finance Forum under the Paris Europlace banner — moderated by Bloomberg's Claudia Cohen, with principals from BlackRock, CACEIS, Standard Chartered, Circle, and Euroclear. Read against a maturing regulatory backdrop (MiCA's first review, the US GENIUS and forthcoming Clarity Acts, the UK's call for evidence), the note captures institutional consensus and its remaining fault lines as the technology moves from experiment to infrastructure, organized around five themes: the shift from experimentation to production, demand-side use cases, architecture and interoperability, the contest over money and sovereignty, and the conditions under which the market scales.

Working Paper

Overstated Unencumbered Mint Capacity

A case discussion of a fiat-backed stablecoin failure mode that requires no stolen mint key, no falsified bank statement, no broken ERC-20, and no direct contract exploit. The system overstates how much it can safely mint because claims and reserves are measured on incompatible finality clocks, and because the authorization join between them is left unguarded. Every component is correct in isolation — the token contract is sound, the bank report honest, the bridge verifies its messages, the attestation accurately scoped — yet the failure lives in the seams between them, where one ledger's notion of 'done' is handed to another that means something different by it. The thesis is narrow: form is not finality.

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.

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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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