In this episode of FRT, Ronit Ghose, Global Head of the Future of Finance think tank at Citi Global Insights, discusses the future of money, tokens, and games. Each year, Ronit’s team publishes the “Citi GPS: Global Perspectives and Solutions” report exploring trends in digital money. This year’s report, subtitled “Blockchain’s Next Billion Users and Trillions in Value” explores why innovation in money is different than innovation in other assets.

The report asks whether you can always spot disruptive innovation and explores central bank digital currency, to include an expert interview by IIF Managing Director of Digital Finance, Jessica Renier. Ronit addresses the potential for tokenization via blockchain, and weighs the opportunity and the addressable need for blockchain.

Technology drivers highlighted in the report as helping blockchain adoption are decentralized identity, zero knowledge proofs, oracles, and secure bridges. Returning to a Web 2.5 concept explored following the 2022 Citi GPS report, Ronit also discusses advances toward Web 3.0 and asks, “What is ownership about in a digital world?” and concludes that ownership is never really absolute.

The report finds that, “The success of blockchain adoption will be measured by when it is being used by a billion plus end users who do not even realize they are using the technology.” It also finds that, “Almost anything of value can be tokenized and tokenization of financial and real-world assets could be the “killer use-case” blockchain needs to drive a breakthrough. We forecast $4 trillion to $5 trillion of tokenized digital securities and $1 trillion of distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based trade finance volumes by 2030.”