abCredo Advisory
AI & Digital Assets
The Silicon Genesis: When Code Met Capital
Picture this: a robot trying to pay for a storage unit.
Somewhere, right now, an autonomous logistics AI wants to book a slice of warehouse space. It doesn't have a credit card, a driver's licence, or forty-five minutes to sit on hold to a call centre — and it certainly doesn't have a face to photograph for a KYC form.
So, how exactly, is it meant to pay?
That question — daft as it sounds — sits at the centre of one of the more interesting collisions in global finance right now: artificial intelligence meeting tokenised real-world assets and stablecoins. Whether that collision turns into a genuine new digital economy, or fizzles out as an over-hyped footnote, is a call every reader can make for themselves.
Our job here isn't to convince you either way — it's to lay out what's actually happening, and who's actually spending money on it.
One thing we'll say plainly, now and again later: cryptocurrencies are extraordinarily volatile, and nothing here is a nudge to buy any of them — a fair chunk of this piece is dedicated to explaining how much of the crypto market is worthless.
What we are interested in is the underlying plumbing, and whether it's worth understanding before it potentially reshapes the pipes your business runs on.
The Secret 66 Years: How AI Grew Up in the Shadows
Artificial Intelligence wasn't invented by Nvidia or any of the Mag 7. It was christened in 1956 at a research workshop at Dartmouth College, organised by a small group of academics — John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon among them. For the next six decades, it lived a quiet, unglamorous life in university basements and military research budgets. It didn't have an app or a mascot. Most people had never heard of it.
Then, on 30 November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT as a free "research preview," and the serene 66-year seclusion ended in spectacular fashion. It took the tool just five days to reach one million users — the fastest a consumer product had ever achieved in history. The corporate blindfold came off overnight, and the AI gold rush was officially launched.
Beyond the Chatbot: The Rise of Agentic AI
If your mental model of AI is still "fancy autocomplete that writes so-so emails," it might be worth an update — respectfully. The current wave isn't about generating text; it's about agentic AI: systems that reason through multi-step problems, operate software tools on their own, and carry a task from start to finish without a human hovering over every click. We've moved from AI that talks, to AI that does.
Now, that creates an oddly practical problem sitting underneath a very futuristic idea: if these autonomous systems are going to act as independent economic participants — booking things, buying things, settling invoices — how, physically, do they pay for any of it? Not sure. This much we know — an enormous amount of money is currently being spent to solve the riddle.
From “Fraud” to Fortune: Wall Street's Ultimate U-Turn (Australia's Still Getting the Kettle On)
To appreciate the scale of what's being built to address that problem, it helps to remember how recently the very same institutions building it were mocking the idea outright.
Not long ago, uttering the word "crypto" within earshot of Wall Street would get you a look usually reserved for people who'd just proposed investing in magic beans. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, called Bitcoin a "fraud," said it was "only good for criminals," and threatened to fire any employee caught trading it. BlackRock's Larry Fink, not to be outdone, dismissed it as a "money laundering index."
Fast-forward to today, and both institutions are — without a hint of irony — pouring billions into building their own private blockchain infrastructure. JPMorgan runs one. BlackRock has become one of the most vocal champions of asset tokenisation on the planet. Wall Street didn't just dip a toe in; it did a complete forward roll into the deep end while insisting it had planned the dive all along.
And it's not just talk. Regulatory guardrails are going up to match — the US GENIUS Act and the EU's MiCA regulation have brought stablecoins inside the regulated banking perimeter rather than leaving them in a grey zone. Fidelity has proudly presented its own institutional stablecoin. The DTCC, which clears the vast majority of Wall Street's equity and debt trades, has secured authorisation to launch a tokenisation service of its own. None of that happens on a whim.
When the people who control the world's financial plumbing change their minds this dramatically, and back it with this much regulatory and capital muscle, it's worth at least raising an eyebrow — and it's not just Wall Street. The NYSE and Nasdaq are building infrastructure to trade tokenised assets alongside ordinary shares, Visa and Mastercard have wired blockchain settlement into their core payment rails, and Stripe has leaned hard into crypto payments on the logic that borderless commerce needs borderless money.
Australian banks, by contrast, have been notably unhurried — comfortable in sandboxes that are already highly profitable and heavily regulated. That's not necessarily a criticism; caution has its virtues. But the gap between global velocity and the leisurely pace Down Under is widening, and gaps like that tend to create both risk and opportunity for whoever notices first.
We've Seen This Movie Before
If all of this feels a bit uncomfortable — vaguely futuristic, vaguely suspicious — that reaction has excellent historical precedent.
Rewind to 1995. Newsweek ran a piece confidently declaring the internet a dead end. Serious, sober commentators insisted no sane person would ever type their credit card number into a website, because the whole thing was "unsafe, unregulated, and full of scammers." The internet, at the time, was regarded as a plaything for hobbyists and academics with too much time on their hands.
We know how that story ended. The dot-com bubble burst spectacularly, and out of the wreckage Amazon survived some 15 severe corrections, including a 90% share-price collapse to become the backbone of global retail. The heart-stopping volatility didn't kill the technology; it just cleared out the nonsense sitting on top of it.
Whether digital assets are tracking the same arc is, again, a question for you to ponder — not one we're going to answer for you.
Kodak, Blockbuster, and the Billion-Dollar Blind Spot
Kodak invented the digital camera back in 1975 — and buried it, terrified it would cannibalise its own film business. It protected the legacy engine until the world had moved on.
Then there is the iconic tragedy of Blockbuster Video. In 2000, a small, struggling startup called Netflix walked into Blockbuster's offices and offered to sell itself for US$50 million, proposing a simple strategy: Netflix would run the digital side of movie rental, Blockbuster would promote it through its thousands of stores. Blockbuster's executives reportedly laughed them out of the room. A decade later, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. Netflix is now a media giant with a market cap in excess of US$300 billion.
Neither company failed because they had a bad business. They failed because they mistook a structural shift in infrastructure for a passing fad — right up until it wasn't.
The Brutal Truth: 99% of Crypto is Rubbish
Let's not tiptoe around this one: the overwhelming majority of cryptocurrencies in existence today are, or will become, worthless.
Thousands of tokens exist with no real use case, propped up by hype, questionable "tokenomics," or venture capital insiders systematically selling into everyone else's enthusiasm. If an asset's entire value proposition is finding a more optimistic buyer tomorrow, that's not investing — that's musical chairs, played with money you can't afford to lose.
If you take one thing from this article, take that.
But writing off the entire technology because most of the tokens built on it are junk is like ditching the internet in 1995 because most websites at the time were embarrassing. The interesting part was never the speculative token. It's the infrastructure underneath it — specifically, tokenisation.
Enter the Real Game: Tokenisation of Real-World Assets (RWAs)
Tokenisation, stripped of jargons, is simply this: taking ownership of a real-world asset — a share, a bond, a building, a bar of gold — and representing it as a digital token on a blockchain. Think of it as a "digital twin" of the asset, one that can be traded 24/7, settled instantly, and passed between owners without the usual stack of intermediaries. It doesn't even require chopping the asset into a million tiny pieces — plenty of institutions tokenise whole assets in single units, purely because it's faster to use as collateral.
It's already a market worth more than US$40 billion, spanning everything from US Treasuries and listed shares to commercial property and gold bars. Larry Fink has repeatedly stated that the industry is at the beginning of tokenisation of all assets. That's one very influential opinion, but it is not a guarantee.
Meet Your New Customer: The Machine
Here's where it gets genuinely strange, in a good way. If tokenisation was only ever going to be a slightly more efficient way for humans to trade shares and bonds, it would be a modest improvement — not a transformation. The transformation shows up when you add AI agents into the mix as economic participants in their own right, transacting constantly, in tiny increments, around the clock, with no meal breaks, no sleep, and no annual leave.
Remember our warehouse-booking AI from the start of this article? It can't walk into a branch, and no "Big Four" bank is opening a transaction account for a customer with no face to photograph. Traditional banking, built for humans on human timeframes, is structurally mismatched with machines operating at the speed of light. If that mismatch is real — and it's a genuine "if" — something has to fill the gap.
Blockchain rails, and stablecoins as the programmable cash that moves across them, are the prime candidate. Not because they're fashionable, but because, on paper at least, they're natively digital, operate continuously, and don't need a human bank teller.
Ask the average Australian on the street whether they believe any of this, and you'll likely get a shrug. To most people, "blockchain" doesn't mean anything, and "AI" still means a chatbot or a job threat — reasonable scepticism.
But Visa, for one, isn't waiting on public opinion: it's quietly launched an "Agentic Registry," tokenisation tools built specifically to handle transactions initiated by AI agents rather than humans. That's not a novelty product. That's a payments giant building the plumbing for a customer that doesn't exist yet, on the bet that it soon will.
Two Ways This Could Change Your Balance Sheet
Setting speculation about tokens aside, tokenisation of real-world assets has genuinely practical implications for business owners, if it plays out at scale.
Suppose you own a $15 million commercial warehouse in Western Sydney and need $1.5 million for a short-term opportunity. Under the current system, your options are to refinance the whole thing or sell it outright. Tokenisation, in theory, lets you sell 10% of the building digitally — releasing liquidity while keeping the rest, and control, in your hands.
The same logic applies to raising capital in the first place: rather than a bank loan or handing a slice of your business to a private equity firm, tokenised debt or equity could let you raise directly from a global pool of investors, with fewer intermediaries taking a cut along the way.
Questions Worth Asking Yourself
We're not going to hand you a bull or bear case, because we don't think anyone can responsibly hand you either one with certainty. What we'd suggest instead is that you may like to consider the following questions:
Does it seem likely that automation and AI adoption keep accelerating from here?
When some of the world's largest asset managers, payment networks, and regulators spend billions building this infrastructure, what does it tell you about their views on the chances of the above scenario becoming reality?
You don't need to buy a single cryptocurrency to think seriously about either of those questions — and given the risks involved, we'd strongly suggest you do not rush out and buy one.
Rather, ask yourself one final question: Would my business be ready to interface with this kind of shift, if it arrives at scale?
That's strategic, not speculative, and worth thinking through before the answer becomes urgent.
At abCredo Advisory, we help business leaders make sense of exactly this kind of structural shift — separating the genuine signal from the noise, and working out what it might mean for your enterprise specifically.
When you're ready to have that conversation, we'd be happy to cut to the chase and get into the substance with you.
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal, financial or tax advice. It does not recommend or endorse any cryptocurrency, digital asset, or investment strategy. All content is drawn from publicly available sources. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets are highly volatile, largely unregulated in many jurisdictions, and carry a significant risk of total loss. Readers should conduct their own independent research and seek advice from a licensed, qualified professional before making any financial decision, and should place no reliance whatsoever on the contents of this article.
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