Furthermore, tokenization covers far more than conventional securities. To take one example, imagine that a museum creates 1,000,000 tokens representing partial ownership of a painting. This would give investors the chance to acquire tiny shares in a wide variety of assets, enabling them to diversify their portfolios to a previously unimaginable degree. The museum could use the funds raised to purchase additional works of art. A similar approach is conceivable for solar power plants, a football club, or indeed more or less any asset. Even though many of these visions would require legislation to be amended, I would go as far as to say that we are no longer very far away from a future in which many new asset classes will be created and tokenized.
Nevertheless, I should sound a note of caution at this point. Blockchain is frequently portrayed as some sort of universal remedy, and the technology is being used for all manner of purposes for which it is completely unsuitable. This is very unfortunate and sometimes leads to frustration with the technology when people finally realize that they should not have used blockchain in this particular context. Yet these projects should not obscure the fact that there are certainly useful blockchain applications. The technology has huge potential as long as it is deployed correctly. To sum up, we can say that the variety of ways in which blockchain can be used is being substantially overestimated. At the same time, the effect that blockchain can have on the areas in which it can be deployed successfully is being significantly underestimated.