Thesis — Toward Blockchain-Native Development
The initiative aspires toward a future in which every company, every community and every idea worth building runs in an optimized blockchain-native environment of its own.
The most exciting thing about the next few years is not that blockchains get faster. It is that they grow into the most diverse ecosystems of infinite economic possibilities.
Walk into the Magic Kingdom and you do not find the same ride forty times over. You find Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland — each with its own architecture, its own pace, its own idea of what a good afternoon looks like. What makes it one park is not that the lands are alike. It is that they share a gate, a safety standard, and the certainty that the whole thing is held to one account.
That is the shape the on-chain world is growing into. Instead of one enormous general-purpose machine that every application has to squeeze itself into, the initiative sees many purpose-built worlds — a trading floor, a game economy, a payments rail, a ticketing registry, a loyalty network — each free to be built in its own space, and settling onto secure base chains with the same guarantee. Different lands. One park.
An on-chain Disneyland, with room for as many lands as there are good ideas.
This is not a forecast. The institutions at the center of finance — depositories, banks, asset managers, card networks and exchanges — are moving its core instruments onto shared ledgers: cash, collateral, funds, bonds and shares. The Bank for International Settlements, the central banks' own bank, calls tokenization “the next logical progression in the evolution of the monetary and financial system”.
“[T]okenization today may be roughly where the internet was in 1996. It won't replace the existing financial system overnight. Instead, picture a bridge being built from both sides of a river, converging in the middle.”
Money moved first. Stablecoins, currency-pegged tokens on public ledgers, grew more than seventyfold from the start of 2020, and the laws written for them arrived on the way up.
Money on public ledgers
$4.2BJan 2020 $312BOct 2026
| Month | Stablecoins in circulation |
|---|---|
| January 2020 | $4.2B |
| July 2020 | $11.4B |
| January 2021 | $27.4B |
| July 2021 | $110B |
| January 2022 | $163B |
| July 2022 | $153B |
| January 2023 | $138B |
| July 2023 | $128B |
| January 2024 | $130B |
| July 2024 | $161B |
| January 2025 | $205B |
| July 2025 | $253B |
| January 2026 | $307B |
| July 2026 | $310B |
| October 2026 | $312B |
Industry by industry the pattern repeats: a leading incumbent moves one high-friction process — a payment, a register, a settlement — onto a shared ledger.
DTCC ran live trades in tokenized stocks, ETFs and Treasuries; Nasdaq won approval to trade tokenized shares on its main order book; the NYSE is building a 24/7 tokenized platform.
Franklin Templeton has used public chains in a registered fund's share record since 2021; BlackRock's tokenized fund runs on nine chains; BNY and Goldman Sachs mirror money-market fund shares as tokens.
J.P. Morgan issues a deposit token on a public Ethereum layer 2; Citi and HSBC move tokenized deposits around the clock across three continents; Société Générale issues euro and dollar stablecoins under EU rules.
Visa piloted stablecoin settlement on nine chains; Mastercard bought a stablecoin infrastructure company; PayPal has its own dollar stablecoin; Stripe offers stablecoin accounts in 101 countries.
Siemens issued bonds straight onto a ledger, one settled in central bank money within minutes; Hong Kong's tokenized green bonds grew from HK$0.8 billion in 2023 to a single offering of about HK$20 billion in 2026.
Robinhood offers stock tokens in more than 120 countries on its own Ethereum layer 2; the London Stock Exchange plans to support trading in tokens of its top 100 shares; Kraken's xStocks traded $35 billion in their first year.
Telegram mini-apps issue tokens only on TON; LINE users get a wallet on Kaia from their LINE account; Sony runs Soneium, a public Ethereum layer 2, through a joint venture.
De Beers has registered five million rough diamonds one by one; Walmart Canada's freight ledger cut disputed invoices from over 70% to under 1%, its builders report; Dubai piloted title deeds on a public ledger.
Going on-chain is a matter of degree, and each rung below moves one more function onto the shared ledger. The top rung is blockchain-native: economic activity whose settlement, custody and rules are on-chain by construction, rather than a conventional business with a token attached to the side of it.
Each party keeps its own copy and reconciles it with the others.
Most businesses today
Records stay off-chain; fingerprints go on a ledger, so later tampering shows.
Georgia's land registry
A shared register among participants; tokens never leave the platform.
Intraday repo on Broadridge's ledger
Tokens move between holders' own wallets under eligibility rules.
Stablecoins and tokenized money funds
The on-chain register is the legal record of title.
Siemens' 2023 digital bond
Settlement, custody and rules on-chain by construction.
On-chain exchanges and lending markets
Most of what the institutions have moved so far sits on the middle rungs. The top rung is the destination this page describes: economies built on-chain from the start, each in a world of its own.
One thing still makes these worlds feel provisional: time. Most single-purpose chains launched in the past are optimistic — they publish what happened, then hold a week-long window open in case somebody objects. Your money is real, but it cannot leave for seven days.
A zero-knowledge proof does something lovelier. Instead of asking the world to wait in case someone complains, it hands over a mathematical receipt showing the work was done correctly. Nothing to dispute, nobody to vouch, nothing to wait for. The moment a world can prove itself, it can open its gates. That is the one unlock this whole picture has been waiting on, and it is here now.
Every chain has to answer one question before a stranger will trust it with anything: why should anyone believe this ledger? The answer has changed exactly twice, and each time the world was asked to spend less and take less on faith.
2009 · Bitcoin
Honesty enforced by physics. To rewrite the past you have to out-burn everyone who ever built on it — an answer of enormous elegance, paid for with an enormous power bill.
2022 · The Merge
Honesty enforced by capital. Post a bond, forfeit it if you lie. The same guarantee as before, at a small fraction of the cost to the world.
Now
Honesty enforced by mathematics. Not that lying would have been expensive — that the answer is right, and that anyone can confirm it in a moment without redoing a step of the work.
Work and stake secure the order of events: who writes next, and why that is hard to subvert. Neither ever checks the events themselves. That has always been done the only way anyone knew how — every computer on the network repeating every computation, forever. The whole world re-runs the whole world, just to stay convinced.
Proof of Correctness retires that last piece of brute force. A validity proof settles what actually happened, and anyone can check it in a moment. Energy, then capital, then mathematics — each era asking for less faith than the one before it, and there is no fourth thing left to stop trusting. Mathematics is the floor. This is where the sequence was always going to end.
Proof of Work. Proof of Stake. Proof of Correctness. The last one is not a better answer to the old question — it is the end of the question.
And it is exactly what makes a park of many lands affordable. While every land had to be re-run by everybody, the world could only ever afford a handful of them. Once a land can simply prove itself, it can afford to be one of thousands.
The migration has a direction. At every layer, what moves on-chain is reaching for the same instrument: applications want worlds of their own, institutions want privacy that a regulator can still check, rollups want finality without a week's wait, and Ethereum itself wants to stop re-running every block. A validity proof answers all four.
Applications
Bitcoin, Zcash and Monero each do one thing; dYdX left shared blockspace for a chain of its own, and Hyperliquid built one around its order book. Robinhood Chain, Sony's Soneium and Tempo, co-incubated by Stripe, followed. Stripe's reason: on chains “designed for trading and DeFi”, a memecoin frenzy once held up one user's payouts for over 12 hours.
Institutions
Deutsche Bank's fund-servicing chain sends proofs to Ethereum instead of transaction data; five US regional banks chose the same design for tokenized deposits; the US depository's ledger criteria admit zero-knowledge proofs if it sees every transfer.
Rollups
Mantle, built on the OP Stack, has switched to validity proofs; the venture arm of Arbitrum's developer signed a one-year exclusive deal to bring zero-knowledge proving to Arbitrum chains.
Ethereum itself
Ethereum is “going all in on ZK”, says its Foundation: validators will be able to verify proofs “rather than re-executing” each block.
Where the change has been measured, the wait shrinks sixtyfold or more.
The wait, measured
Mantle, final on Ethereum
Ethereum, proving one block
For an application moving on-chain, the proof is not one advantage among many. It is the one the others stand on.
Final once the proof is verified, with no challenge window and no committee, multisig or enclave standing in for one.
Transaction data stays with the business and its regulator, while the proof shows that every transition followed the rules.
A holder proves eligibility, residence or accreditation without handing identity documents to every counterparty.
An exchange proves that its customers' balances are covered without publishing any one of them.
One chain verifies a proof of another chain's state instead of trusting a bridge's own signers.
A rollup tuned to its one application, and proving infrastructure built for one known workload rather than an unpredictable mixture.
Proof turns a ledger everyone must replay into one anyone can verify, and a handful of worlds into as many as there are good ideas.
SourcesDTCC, Broadridge, J.P. Morgan, DefiLlama, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank for International Settlements and the Ethereum Foundation among others, each cited in full in The Onchain Operating Model. Tracker values read in October 2026.