by John Jameson
While you are being sold the benefits of crypto’s decentralised frontend narrative, the System of the World is being reengineered. But, behind the scenes, the backend is forcing physical assets into a mechanism of centralised control.
It’s the little things. A statement here, a press release there, the geeks focusing on the tech and their brave new world. But all the while it is getting smaller, the sides compacting in. Monopolies are eating the world. A 1980s banquet that has not lost its appetite. The events you see in the news, the movies and TV shows you consume, the novels you read, the podcasts you listen to, and the social media feeds that curate it all. They influence your opinions about everything.
But monopolisation of the media and popular culture isn’t an isolated case. Over the last 30 years, around the same time politicians began rebranding themselves as leaders, real power shifted from elected politicians to unelected experts. Quangos in the UK, regulatory agencies in the US, now draft and enforce the rules that govern your life, with little democratic oversight.
Politicians pass bills that are vague frameworks. In the UK, they pass through the Commons and the Lords. In the US, through Congress and the Senate. Royal Assent or a presidential signature turns them into a blank cheque with unlimited delegated power inside. That cheque gets handed to technocrats. They fill in the details. Pollution limits, drug approvals, broadcast standards, and these are laid before Parliament or published in the Federal Register. Not for approval. Just for notification. They become law automatically unless someone moves to block them. And almost no one ever does.
But the technocrats didn't seize control. They acquired it, quietly, over decades. Elected politicians realised they were too constrained by voter pressure, always spending too much, always promising too much. So they changed tactics. They began to build more politically efficient systems that removed them from the results of their policies. This new style of politics released a free market ideology. Deregulated businesses, tax cuts, and relaxed antitrust legislation. They called it Reagonomics. Companies merged and acquired. And another domain began to consolidate around the accumulation of wealth and power.
Today, the US stock market is not controlled by the handful of companies that dominate the index weightings. That’s the narrative the media wants you to believe. It's controlled instead by just three that collectively control trillions of dollars of assets, and this means, through their circular ownership via ETFs, they influence a market cap that is around the GDP of the entire United States of America.
BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, the Three, have an invisible touch that controls nearly 80% of all passively indexed money inside the US. Passive investing is now the dominant form of equity investment, and this means, when you are betting against the direction of the US stock market, you are, in fact, betting against the collective power of three mega-corporations.
Monopolisation is all around you, affecting every aspect of your life. Subtle for now, invisible to most. But with programmable money and tokenised real-world assets, monopolisation will shift from affecting to effecting every aspect of your life. Directly, inescapably, everywhere. Everything is connected. Around the same time the new political strategy began to open markets, TCP/IP was formalised as the internetwork standard. PCs were connected to mainframes. The first browser. Lycos. Amazon. Google. Then came the centralisation of businesses. And then social media. The centralisation of ideas.
And from the centralisation of ideas, came the CEO King. Then along came crypto and Web3.
Its decentralised narrative was being nam-shubbed around the YouTuberSphere, and somewhere in the admittedly demyelinated pathways of my mind, I remembered something Rushdie said in Midnight’s Children. To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. BlackRock et al have swallowed the stock market. Their ETFs herding a market of stocks into what is effectively a centralised monopoly. My number one tool for finding ideas isn’t a chart. A price history can never give you a reason, though it can be useful as a trigger. And it’s not fundamentals either. Wall Street valuations run on earnings and discounted cash flows. That’s like blaming the effect on the effect. The tool I use more than any other is the counterfactual. I use them to find background conditions. No idea is stupid. Anything goes; nothing is off-limits.
What if you wanted to build a global network, one capable of recording every tagged metadata interaction ever created, how would you do it and what about the cost. To design, test, scale, and secure the architecture, and to persuade the public to use it, would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
What if, instead of spending that money, you anonymously released an open-source protocol and a simple algorithm, and let the free market, with light-touch regulation, do the rest? Bitcoin. What if non-fungible tokens, NFTs, were an R&D test project, a proof of concept to determine whether digital ownership could be scaled using a decentralised network, a blockchain? Most counterfactuals will take you nowhere, but occasionally, every once in a while, they uncover gold.
What if crypto and its decentralised platforms swallow the world? The Genesis Act was passed into US law on July 18th, 2025, and creates the federal framework for payment stablecoins. The Clarity Act passed the House of Representatives in 2024 and is expected to be finalised in 2026. It defines a clear distinction between stablecoins and securities. It states that a stablecoin backed 100% by cash and US T-bills is not a security.
These two acts unlock institutional adoption and enable a new form of liquidity. This matters because for the first time deep US dollar liquidity will be generated from the atomisation of demand. From billions of small US dollar transactions aggregated into permanent demand. Demand that is backed and controlled 100% by the United States. Today, the total market capitalisation of the stablecoin market is around $300 billion.
What if over the next decade, the stablecoin market is expanded to $6 trillion? Given the global demand for US dollars, I think that’s possible. But if that happens it will centralise control of the bond market into the hands of a few companies. Like BlackRock and the monopolising of the stock market.
But everything needs a reason to exist. Stablecoins do not issue credit. And that means Basel III does not apply to them. They are tokenised claims backed one-to-one by US T-bills. Because they tokenise existing dollars rather than create new ones, they are non-inflationary and do not expand the banking system’s balance sheet. That right there is reason enough.
What the geeks forget when playing with their shiny new tokenisation technology, is while theirs is a brave new world on the front end, an old school centralised control system will control the backend. A company creates a legal wrapper, an LLC, an SPV, or a trust. And that vehicle buys the real-world asset, whatever it may be.
Financial assets like sovereign and corporate debt, private loans, public stocks, and private company shares, real physical assets like residential and commercial real estate, farmland, gold, and silver. The tokenisation of hard financial assets and real physical assets is already happening. Next will be royalties, music, film, and book, intellectual property, licensing rights and trademarks, carbon credits, emission allowances and offsets, and infrastructure usage licences. Real World Asset tokenisation will eat the world. It will centralise everything. Tangibles first. Then intangibles.
But the centralised wrapper entity owns the asset. The legal rights defined in contracts. A token represents fractional equity in that entity or debt claim, or revenue stream. And as tokenisation eats the world, you will be pushed further down the layer cake, abstracted away from the physical asset programmatically enforced from inside a smart contract running on a blockchain.
Causal chains running across time, mediating, confounding, colliding. You are probably holding a node of one of those chains as you read this. The oblong in your hand is being miniaturised. Watches, earbuds, eyeglasses. Devices designed to do only one thing. Increase your number of interactions per second with the System of the World. Every click. Every search. Every location. Every purchase. Every pause. Every scroll. Every swipe. The ontological substrate of you, written permanently to servers you will never see. But in an act of pure irony, the more decentralised society becomes, the more it will be controlled.
And as engineers espouse the benefits of this crypto protocol over that, of this token over another, rubbing their hands at the brilliance of the design, how Cardano’s separation of its ADA token from its Plutus-driven smart contracts makes it more computationally efficient than Ethereum, the space behind them nudged in. Just a little. Just beyond their level of perception. Most crypto speculators focus on decentralisation. They are looking in the wrong place.
John Jameson publishes a Substack called Pretty Bang Bang
