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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

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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

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

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.

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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.

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

Georgia Charts a Pragmatic Path Toward Institutional Tokenization

A recap of the Intelligence Economy Institute's Tokenization Lessons from Georgia workshop in Tbilisi. Regulators, market infrastructures, banks, the public registry and international partners converged on a pragmatic, market-driven path: reinforce trusted institutions rather than replace them, let the market decide where tokenization adds real value, and treat real estate, capital markets, payments and financial inclusion as the priority areas. The binding constraint is not technology but institutional capacity, coordination and infrastructure design.

6 min read

AI Agents Don't Need Better Payment APIs. They May Need a Native Monetary Layer.

The debate over AI agents and money is usually framed as stablecoins versus bank APIs, but that comparison misses the real shift. Agents can already reach money through bank and payment-provider APIs; what they lack is a way to act as independent economic participants across organizational boundaries without a proprietary intermediary or a bespoke integration for every relationship. The consequential question is not faster payments but whether money itself becomes programmable, interoperable infrastructure, an open economic execution layer for the internet, with tokenized bank money and regulated settlement assets as likely as stablecoins.

6 min read

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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.