Bringing financial assets onchain is called tokenization. It seems like tokenization will be one of the next big adoption waves for crypto. I wanted to brainstorm about what second order effects of wide scale tokenization might be.

Let's assume that pretty much any financial asset that's issued is tokenized, or better yet directly issued onchain. Think similar to how any document written by anyone today is likely to be digital.

1. Consumers around the world can buy any asset seamlessly. They only need a wallet.
2. Brokers are disintermediated. Their roles are relegated to only being financial advisors.
3. The long tail effect is truly felt in the world of financial assets. Similar to how information was gatekept by news outlets, assets are today gatekept by brokers. Once the gate keepers are removed, it's a bonanza.
4. Aggregators (similar to Ben Thompson's definition) become the most important value add in the supply chain of financial assets (see curation). Index fund issuers are well positioned here.
5. Asset selection criteria for a retail investment portfolio will expand to include more factors beyond just returns. Similar to how ESG became a factor, expect dozens more. This will make the marketing of any asset key. Trends like retail investors investing in a MUNI because they care about a specific improvement in their city will become widespread.
6. Assets like MUNIs which today find distribution hard and are thus issued in groups or only for very large projects will become much more bespoke. There might be a MUNI token for that park in your neighborhood.
7. Assets from non-US countries will get much better distribution. Today they are at the mercy of either US stock exchanges or US brokers to get access to US investors. Expect market caps of foreign companies or other assets to get better multipliers.
8. Crypto native tokens will need to up their game. Part of the reason why long tail shitcoins got so popular is people outside the US wanted to have easy access to trading anything. Once they get access to higher quality assets, shitcoins will be pushed to the side, finally!
9. Crypto exchanges and wallets will start actually replacing people's banks. As more and more assets get onchain, most banks will fail to catch up and will become the Kodaks of the finance world. Innovator's dilemma at play.

Will tokenization finally push crypto into the mainstream and achieve the financial revolution we all envisioned in the 2015-2019 era? Think this time we're almost there!