Reports
Long-form research, fully cited.
Each report is available as an embedded, readable PDF with a download and citation block, APA and BibTeX included.
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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.
Zakaryae Boudi · August 6, 2026
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Tokenization Lessons from Georgia
An independent policy and research study on how a small open economy can build a responsible tokenized-economy strategy. Its argument is that Georgia's tokenization potential does not come from technology alone, but from the institutional foundations built through public-sector reform, registry modernization, digital public infrastructure, financial-sector supervision, and macroeconomic credibility. The study asks a practical question: how can Georgia prioritize the use cases where tokenization genuinely adds value while safeguarding sovereignty, stability, legal clarity, and trust? Produced in partnership with the ReTech Center at École des Ponts Business School and supported by Hadron by Tether, it maps priorities across money and payments, capital markets, and real-economy finance, and frames Georgia as a potential responsible tokenization laboratory.
Zakaryae Boudi · July 21, 2026
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Who Orchestrates Tokenized Money?
Tokenized money is arriving in three forms that do not convert at par: tokenized bank deposits, wholesale central bank money, and stablecoins. The strategic question is not which format wins, but who owns the orchestration layer, the layer that decides, for each transaction, which money is used, which rail carries it, in what sequence, under whose compliance, and how the cash leg settles against the asset. This report maps nine models competing for that layer along two axes, whether a player issues money or only moves it, and whether it is public or private, from coordination-and-messaging layers and edge aggregators to settlement utilities, single-bank networks, stablecoin issuers, native payment networks, public base layers, mutualized utilities, and neutral coordination protocols. One pattern runs through all nine: each model's core strength is also its structural risk, so the likely outcome is not a single winner but a negotiated stack. The deepest risk is concentration, whoever wins concentration wins a chokepoint, which makes the contest over the orchestration layer a question of sovereignty as much as of commerce.
Zakaryae Boudi · July 19, 2026
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Climate Integrity Infrastructure, Volume I
Volume I of the Intelligence Economy Institute's study of the infrastructure behind high-integrity climate assets, MRV (measurement, reporting, verification), digital verification, registries, certification, and finance, produced in partnership with the ReTech Center at École des Ponts Business School. It moves from measurement to bankability, Article 6 readiness, and high-integrity environmental markets, establishing the foundations on which a tonne of abatement can be measured, trusted, and financed. Its organising discipline: a tonne that cannot be measured cannot be trusted; a tonne that cannot be trusted cannot be sold; and a tonne sold twice was never abated at all.
Zakaryae Boudi · July 13, 2026
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Cheap Translation, Scarce Commitment
Advanced AI can increasingly inspect software interfaces, infer intent, translate between heterogeneous systems, and generate integration logic on demand, raising a provocative question: do standards still have a function when machines can mediate interoperability dynamically? Decomposing standards into their two separable jobs, compressing the cost of compatibility, and fixing the locus of commitment, this paper argues that AI collapses the first and cannot, by construction, supply the second, because commitment is a relation between accountable persons, not a property of representations. Using tokenized finance as the limiting case and analysing sixteen operational domains, it projects the future forms of standards and concludes that AI redistributes the standards function rather than retiring it: expect fewer, deeper, more executable standards. Translation becomes cheap; commitment remains scarce.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng · July 7, 2026
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Programmable Money Meets Market Infrastructure
An analytical synthesis of the Point Zero Forum 2026 (Zurich), drawn from the author's notes across nine sessions and a follow-up research coordination discussion. It works through the settlement layer (atomic settlement), the money layer (stablecoins and tokenized commercial bank money), the infrastructure layer (a Swift-convened Policy Lab on DLT and resilience, and cross-border payment frictions), market integrity (financial crime in tokenized markets), the issuer perspective (a fireside with Tether's chief executive and the Georgian lari stablecoin project), and a developing-economy test case (Georgia), situating public initiatives including the Eurosystem's Pontes and Appia programs, Project Agorá, Nexus, the German Commercial Bank Money Token, and the Swift shared ledger.
Zakaryae Boudi · July 2, 2026
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Ontology Control Layers over LLMs
When a large language model is asked to act on a user's behalf, book a flight, approve a payment, the designer must constrain what the model is allowed to say so it matches what the rest of the system is prepared to act on. This paper maps the middle layer between the model and the executing system: the ontology control layer that turns free-form text into structured, validated, actionable commands. It lays out a four-axis design space and four reference architectures (Prompt-Bound, Schema-Bound, Grammar-Constrained, and Verified Mediator), an honest accounting of what each can and cannot formally prove, and a survey of the formal methods themselves, with particular attention to the B method, framed around five concentric rings of verifiability. An agentic-payment example runs throughout.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 26, 2026
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A Market Infrastructure for AI Compute Capacity
The market for AI compute now runs on multi-year, take-or-pay commitments worth several hundred billion dollars a year, illiquid, non-standardised, and impossible to price, transfer, hedge, or finance with any discipline. This investor note sets out the missing market infrastructure: a tokenized venue built on a standard contract for compute capacity, capacity rights issued as tokens on a public blockchain, and atomic settlement against regulated digital money. It lays out the opportunity, the compute unit, the tokenized design, the path to market, and the financing sequence.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng · June 16, 2026
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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.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 11, 2026
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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.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 10, 2026
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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.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 9, 2026
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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.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 7, 2026
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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.
Zakaryae Boudi · June 3, 2026
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Operability in Tokenized Finance with AI
Operability, not capability, is what has held tokenized finance back. As financial systems move from static to programmable instruments and from isolated platforms to composable markets, safely overseeing a tokenized workflow outgrows what a human can realistically manage, while today's AI agents and real-world financial infrastructure suffer a structural mismatch: agents work best in structured environments, but even mature tokenized systems are fragmented, brittle, and opaque. This IEI note argues the answer lies in operationalizing context into structured inputs for AI agents and constraining those agents to behave predictably, in ways that remain verifiable, auditable, and interpretable to humans, and previews the Institute's 2026 research agenda on the problem.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng · June 2, 2026
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Euro-Native Tokenised Market Infrastructure
The Intelligence Economy Institute's response to the Eurosystem's Appia public consultation, submitted to the European Central Bank on tokenised financial market infrastructure. It addresses the high-level principles governing Appia, the design of a shared network layer, European strategic autonomy, common standards, the settlement of central bank money across one or several networks, the governance of Eurosystem core services, and the conduct of the Appia investigation, framed around monetary primacy, ontology-driven control, and strategic autonomy, and drawing on TKNFRA's work on the INTERLOCC settlement protocol and euro monetary sovereignty.
Zakaryae Boudi · April 15, 2026
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The Programmable CSD
A tokenized note on the programmable Central Securities Depository: how settlement, custody, and corporate-actions infrastructure changes when the depository layer itself becomes programmable, and what that implies for market structure, finality, and governance.
Zakaryae Boudi · January 25, 2026
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Institutional Tokenization in the Year Ahead: Scale in 2026 with 2025 Lessons
A perspective on where institutional tokenization is heading: what 2025 taught the market, and the conditions required to move from pilots to production scale in 2026, across infrastructure, standards, and the institutions that must adopt them.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng · January 5, 2026
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Tokenized Notes, Sibos 2025
A field note from Sibos 2025. In twelve months the conversation has shifted decisively from “what if” to “how fast” and “at what scale,” with the spotlight tilting firmly toward tokenized money, stablecoins, deposit tokens, and the rails that will carry them.
Intelligence Economy Institute · October 7, 2025
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DAZ for DeFi: Institutional-Grade Digital Finance through Digital Access Zones
Over the past decade decentralized finance has advanced from experimental smart contracts into a sophisticated ecosystem supporting billions in value. This note introduces Digital Access Zones (DAZ) as a way to bring institutional-grade compliance and controls to DeFi without sacrificing composability.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng · September 11, 2025
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What Tokenization Can Do for Development Finance
A detailed report on how programmable, tokenized infrastructure can serve development finance, widening access to capital, lowering settlement friction, and bringing transparency and traceability to development-finance flows where they are most needed.
Intelligence Economy Institute · July 23, 2025
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A Tokenized Path out of AML Isolation
How verifiable, programmable compliance can reconnect under-served jurisdictions to the global financial system, strengthening anti-money-laundering safeguards rather than weakening them, and offering a path out of de-risking and financial isolation.
Intelligence Economy Institute · June 19, 2025
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Unlocking Scalability and Interoperability in Tokenization Systems, Chapter 2
Chapter 2 of the FeverTokens × Caisse des Dépôts working paper. It extends the architecture toward cross-system settlement and interoperability, detailing the mechanisms that let tokenization systems communicate and settle across heterogeneous ledgers and traditional rails.
Intelligence Economy Institute, Caisse des Dépôts · April 2, 2025
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DebLeb Finance: A Decentralized Banking Protocol for Lebanon
A working paper proposing DebLeb Finance, a tokenized, rules-based banking protocol designed to help rebuild trust and function in Lebanon's collapsed banking system, combining programmable settlement with transparent, verifiable governance.
Zakaryae Boudi, Sara Kawas, Saman Sarbazvatan, Jiulin Teng, Hervé Alexandre, Ali Chehab · December 11, 2024
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Unlocking Scalability and Interoperability in Tokenization Systems, Chapter 1
Chapter 1 of the FeverTokens × Caisse des Dépôts working paper. It frames the scalability and interoperability constraints that tokenization systems must overcome to move from isolated pilots to connected, production-grade market infrastructure.
Intelligence Economy Institute, Caisse des Dépôts · November 14, 2024
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Moving Digital Assets: The Imperative of Modular, Composable, and Interconnected Tokenization Systems
The promise of tokenization, efficiency, transparency, accessibility, cannot be realized unless the underlying systems are modular, open, composable, and interconnected at scale. This note makes the case for interoperable rails across DLT and traditional financial systems for the movement, settlement, and transformation of assets.
Intelligence Economy Institute · October 1, 2024
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Tokenized Economies: A New Paradigm
The foundational paper setting out the thesis that tokenization is not a product or asset class but an economic paradigm, and a first map of the infrastructure, standards, and institutions that paradigm will require.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng, Sara Kawas, Saman Sarbazvatan · June 25, 2024
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The Imperative of Integrating International Financial Standards into Tokenization Protocols
Tokenized systems cannot stand apart from the financial system they aim to serve. This paper argues that tokenization protocols must terminate in the disclosure, messaging, and instrument standards finance already uses, and shows where that integration has to happen.
Zakaryae Boudi, Jiulin Teng, Sara Kawas, Saman Sarbazvatan · April 28, 2024
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Towards a B-Method Framework for Smart Contract Verification: The Case of ACTUS Financial Contracts
The increasing use of advanced smart contract structures in finance necessitates rigor and scalability in ensuring their correctness. Traditional auditing falls short of comprehensive security; formal verification offers a robust, scalable approach to secure-by-design models. We introduce a B-method framework for modeling and verifying smart contracts based on the ACTUS standard for financial instruments, converting ACTUS specifications into B-method constructs to systematically model, analyze, and verify financial contract implementations on-chain.
Zakaryae Boudi, Mohamed Toub · December 26, 2023
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Scaling Climate Action: Unleashing Innovative Technologies in Sustainable Finance
A report from the BIS Innovation Hub (COP28 TechSprint) on how innovative technologies, including tokenization and digital infrastructure, can scale sustainable finance and mobilise capital for climate action.
BIS Innovation Hub · December 4, 2023