A few years ago the only real example of tokenization was basically stablecoins. Now there's a whole endless list of them. Tokenized indices, commodities, ETFs, stocks. And this is something I personally love.
I think tokenization is genuinely the way to break down bureaucratic borders. Someone who wants to go long or short on stocks, or indices, and just can't. Maybe in their country a broker won't even let them open an account. Maybe the broker only allows it for professional clients and leaves retail out. That's exactly where Hyperliquid, and all the teams building on top of it, have the power to change everything.
And they are already changing everything. Anyone with a wallet can connect it to Hyperliquid and go long or short on a ton of coins, stocks, ETFs, commodities, indices, even some pre-IPO names, stuff that as a retail investor you'd normally never get. It's a real use case. It's not an idea, it's not a whitepaper. Right now, while you're reading this, somebody probably just longed a million dollars worth of Nvidia on Hyperliquid.
Robinhood was born as an app built to democratize finance but i think Hyperliquid is the one actually doing it, there's no account to open, no approval, no professional-client requirement. You connect a wallet and you're in. This is the real democratization of finance and this doesn't affect only trading.
Let's talk about stablecoins. It doesn't matter if you're in another room or on the other side of the world. In four seconds, on Solana, I can send you $100k in USDC. No intermediaries, no waiting days. The moment I hit send, everything is in your wallet.
And that's just my use case, sending money to someone. For a huge part of the world the real point is something else. There are people whose local currency is bleeding value while they sleep, and a stablecoin is just a dollar account they can finally open. No American bank, no permission. There's someone sending money home to family without watching 6-7% of it get eaten by fees and middlemen. And that's not about trading, at all. For a lot of people, access to a stable currency is the whole product.
That said, there's still a long way to go. Tokenization of real financial instruments is useful to me when we're talking about trading on Hyperliquid, long and short, basically that. But for pure holding, based on my own experience, it's a different story. If I want to go long on Nvidia I go to Hyperliquid. But if I want to actually own a share of Nvidia, like just holding it, I'd never keep it in my wallet. I'd keep it in a brokerage account, where I'm insured and protected and the risk is lower. Hold tokenized stocks in your wallet and all that security is on you. One wrong click, one confirmation, and it's gone. No support, no way to get it back, nothing.
So yeah, tokenization really does have the power to change the world but for just holding, I don't see why I'd risk keeping VWCE in my Solana wallet, in my Phantom wallet instead of holding everything in my IBKR account.
The single wallet though, that's the cool part in my opinion. You can download Phantom, and in one single wallet on Solana you can hold Zcash, Monero, Hyperliquid, Bitcoin, Solana, shares of Nvidia, Google, the S&P 500, gold, silver, QQQ, and other things I won't bother listing here. One wallet, and you can have all of that. That's what's genuinely cool here. No names, nothing in the way. In two minutes you download an app and you can basically do whatever you want.
But it always lands back on the same thing. Security and risk. If something goes wrong and I lose those tokens, nobody is coming to help me. I'm done forever.