OVERHEARD in a business planning meeting: “What will happen to asset tokenisation with advances in artificial intelligence (AI)? Do we still need to prepare for it?”
To put this in perspective: Tokenisation is more relevant than ever with clear industry uptake, especially in finance.
However, AI has become the top-of-mind priority for many companies, not merely as a strategy for growth but a matter of survival.
We’re not simply living in the age of AI; we’ve reached the aspirational touchstone of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Nvidia’s chief executive officer opined last month: “I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI!”
This means AI has evolved from performing narrow specific tasks into human-level intelligence, which can solve complex problems with the same agility and autonomy as human minds.
There has never been a better time to explore tokenisation in our domestic market. The main regulators Bank Negara Malaysia, Securities Commission, and Bursa Malaysia have all released public discussion papers over the past year along with sandbox announcements.
When a financial asset is tokenised, it is represented digitally in the form of tokens and recorded on an online ledger known as blockchain.
Decades prior, financial markets were revolutionised by digitisation – with dematerialisation (of physical shares) and scripless trading (of paperless securities).
Tokenisation promises to run faster and farther, with cross-sector implications.
Progress is encouraging but patience is required. The foundational infrastructure or ‘plumbing’ for digital asset flows needs to be designed from the ground up, likely with new intermediary roles defined and appointed.
For now, the sandbox projects are contained, mainly curated for the wholesale segment, and may take a few years to graduate.
The integration and interoperability of blockchain rails with legacy banking systems will have to be in sync to make sure they talk to each other. Compliance programmes must be upgraded. Crucially, the legal scaffold for this new ecosystem and its counter-party relationships must be established early, so that ‘the cart is not placed before the horse’.
Meanwhile, as momentum gains on this front, gravity is shifting. Agentic AI has begun to take over online payment, stock trading, and customer engagement.
eCommerce will soon be transformed. AI agents will perform these tasks end-to-end, from data collection to reasoning to execution to self-correction, without any human in the loop.
AI-enhanced tokenisation could be completely transparent to the user who won’t know that tokenised assets (such as stablecoins) are quietly settling transactions, allocating investments, and managing portfolios in the background.
Market buzz has changed from chains to claws. Until recently, you’d read about local startups building more efficient blockchains.
Today, the interest is in developing claws (AI agents, nicknamed after the OpenClaw platform) to boost productivity and automate workflows. Globally it has reached a feverish “state of psychosis” according to OpenAI’s co-founder.
Claws can be plugged into chains, which show the two technologies converging. It’s not a new trend: Blockchain’s decentralised nature has always been touted as an auditability mechanism for AI – a ‘trust layer for the intelligence layer’.
Still, it’s obvious both technologies are moving at different speeds of commercialisation, with different target readiness on our national roadmaps.
Quantum computing deserves mention in this context, as it has a shared future with AI and complements each other.
Quantum has the power to break the cryptography of certain blockchains i.e., it can breach the security of crypto wallets.
No doubt this has put the industry on notice, not least among those who have launched tokenised products on non-quantum-resistant blockchains.
AI has reached a stage of ubiquity that’s impossible to ignore. Tokenisation on the other hand, have success stories that are enticing but foreign.
It treads like an research and development initiative for news headlines, with a handful of use cases in this market. After all, availability is not the same as accessibility.
Decision-makers have to wrestle with AI strategies that could bring immediate measurable return on investment and lead to new operating models or enterprise-wide reinvention.
They have to maximise benefits with limited resources. It’s not a binary choice but a priority focus amid current reality.
Conceivably, AI will enter mainstream first despite tokenisation’s headstart for 10-odd years. Smart agents will manage our everyday finances before most financial assets are tokenised with smart contracts.
These aren’t merely robo-advisors for investment but robo-assistants for our household budgets, with personal shopping, family vacations, tuition classes, and doctor visits thrown in!
All this can be done with ‘natural language’ commands – a huge contrast to crypto that remains challenging for the public to comprehend and use.
Leapfrogging is not uncommon in developing economies: Digital payments skipped credit cards in India, crypto wallets over bank accounts in Nigeria, mobile-powered money services over landline-based branches in Kenya.
Tech adoption is a curve not a checklist, a journey not a destination. Will AI mature first? Trust this market will find its own way, with a few shortcuts!
Edmund Yong is a director of the Generative AI Association of Malaysia and ambassador of the Global Blockchain Business Council founded in Davos. The views expressed here are the writer’s own
