Financial advisor Rick Edelman argues against waiting for customer demand for tokenization. He likens it to Steve Jobs, who built products customers didn't know they needed. He believes the superior speed, cost, and access of tokenized assets will inherently drive adoption once the products are made available, bypassing traditional market research.
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A 'dam' represents pent-up demand where users are frustrated and merely 'coping' with the status quo. Introducing a 10x better solution, often via new tech, doesn't create demand; it bursts the dam, releasing a flood of customers who see it as a magical fix for a problem they already have.
True innovation requires building features customers don't yet know to ask for. Bloomberg's success came from providing functionality users hadn't imagined was possible with computers, rather than just reacting to their explicit requests.
JPMorgan's Scott Lucas argues that tokenization's most profound impact is not just making existing processes faster or cheaper. It's about fundamentally redesigning financial instruments—like paying bond coupons by the millisecond—which could open up debt capital markets to smaller companies that cannot access them today.
The key to tokenization is combining two worlds: traditional finance's expertise in legally custodying assets, and crypto's native, free infrastructure for 24/7 trading and liquidity. This fusion makes it possible to make previously untradable assets like private equity, art, or collectibles instantly liquid and accessible.
Palantir's product strategy is "more artistic than science." Instead of reacting to current market demands, the company builds solutions that tap into deep, misunderstood societal trends, much like an artist captures the future zeitgeist. This approach means creating products years before their relevance becomes obvious.
Polymarket's major backing from the NYSE's parent company validates the trend of turning all information and events into liquid, tokenized markets. This "financialization of everything" will disrupt established industries, from sports betting to traditional finance, by offering more efficient, decentralized alternatives.
Unlike the early iPhone era, developers are hesitant to build for new hardware like the Apple Vision Pro without a proven audience. They now expect platform creators to de-risk development by first demonstrating a massive user base, shifting the market-building burden entirely onto the hardware maker.
A product has strong market pull when it aligns with the customer's true goal (their "to-do list") far better than their current action (their "calendar"). Automated note-taking app JMP had pull because it perfectly matched financial advisors' hidden goal to minimize time spent on compliance paperwork.
The ChatGPT App Store launch is being compared to the original Apple App Store. Developers who are early and build useful applications for its 800 million weekly active users have the opportunity to create significant businesses, mirroring the success of early mobile app pioneers who capitalized on first-mover advantage.
In past cycles, corporate interest in crypto was reactive to retail frenzy and often insincere. This time, financial institutions are building lasting tech and defining clear business cases, such as cost reduction and new product offerings, signaling a fundamental shift toward sustainable integration.
