In November 2025, Mark Mobius, one of the most decorated emerging markets investors of the past half century, alongside Cornell University faculty and a McKinsey consultant, published The Digital Currency Revolution: Central Bank Digital Currencies, Crypto, and the Future of Global Finance. The book maps the global race between CBDCs, stablecoins, and digital payment systems with considerable rigour, and represents, fairly accurately, the consensus view of where digital finance is heading. However, ideas like those posited in it, that the future of money is fundamentally a competition between forms of digital currency, are, in my view, missing the point.
The contest between CBDCs and stablecoins is real and well-documented. But it is a second-order question. What the debate overlooks is the possibility that digital currency is not the destination, but rather the opening move in a considerably more ambitious transformation: a financial system in which any asset, whether a stock portfolio, a real estate holding, a commodity position, or a tokenized fund, can be deployed as a form of value at the point of transaction, on the same infrastructure, in real time. A system in which the currency question becomes irrelevant because the infrastructure makes everything interoperable; everything becomes money.
In fact, that infrastructure already exists, and it renders the CBDC debate beside the point.
The case for CBDCs is not without merit. In emerging markets, where large portions of the population remain outside the formal banking system, a government-issued digital currency offers something genuinely valuable: a direct, low-cost connection between citizens and the financial system. India's digital rupee operates offline, enabling transactions even without an internet connection; Brazil's Drex is streamlining collateral management for credit markets. These are real solutions to real problems, and they represent the kind of progress that has convinced major financial institutions to take digital assets seriously.
But every one of these initiatives shares the assumption that the objective is access to a better form of currency. CBDCs are a digitized version of money that already exists. They tokenize one asset class within the same centralized logic that has always governed the monetary system. The digital euro is still the euro, albeit a more efficient, more programmable, more portable version; an improvement, but not a transformation. The question that the CBDC debate has yet to engage with, is what happens when the asset being transacted is not currency at all. When the thing a buyer wants to deploy is an equity position, a real estate token, or a commodity holding. CBDCs, by design, were never meant to go that far.
The word tokenization appears throughout the literature on CBDCs, typically as a technical mechanism by which digital currencies are issued and transferred. But I believe tokenization is not a mechanism, rather it is the premise of an entirely different financial system, one in which equities, real estate, commodities, funds, and sovereign currencies all exist on the same ledger, governed by the same rails.
Consider what that means in practice. Today, making a down payment on a house means calling your broker, selling a portion of your portfolio, waiting for settlement, and wiring the proceeds to a bank. In a fully tokenized system, that chain doesn’t just get faster, it disappears entirely. A portion of your portfolio converts at the point of transaction, directly to the payment, without liquidation and without the need for intermediaries. This is what the conversation on CBDCs is missing, because it requires a different starting point entirely. The question is not which digital currency gains adoption. In my view, it is whether the infrastructure exists to make the asset class irrelevant.
For most individuals, wealth remains largely inactive. Whether it is a stock portfolio sitting in a brokerage account, a real estate holding storing value that requires a lengthy and expensive liquidation process to access, or even cash lying inert in a savings account between transactions, the traditional financial system has always accepted this passive state without any serious questioning.
Tokenization completely challenges this paradigm. By hosting every liquid asset in digital form across a shared infrastructure, the division between storing value and utilizing it is dissolved. Rather than managing an isolated portfolio on one side and a separate payment system on the other, you operate within a single, unified system. Consequently, every liquid asset you possess becomes instantly accessible at any given moment to handle daily life, whether that involves purchasing groceries, covering a car payment, or finalizing a property transaction. This is an entirely different proposition. CBDCs give people a better way to spend a digital version of their local currency, but interoperability gives people a way to spend anything.
The institutions currently invested in the CBDC debate are, by and large, thinking about the right technology and the wrong question. CBDCs interoperating with other CBDCs, which is the most ambitious version of what the current debate envisions, is still a system built around sovereign currency as the unit of exchange. It does not get you to a grocery store where you pay for apples with a denomination of your stock portfolio.
At ForumPay, we have already built the infrastructure that points toward that world. Today, we convert any digital asset, whether crypto or stablecoins, into fiat at the point of transaction, in real time, giving sellers exactly the form of value they need regardless of what the buyer holds. That capability, applied to a fully tokenized asset ecosystem, is precisely what a genuinely interoperable financial system requires.
We are not there yet. The tokenization of real-world assets at the scale needed is still underway. But the rails exist and the logic is proven. What remains is for the broader industry to catch up to what this infrastructure has already made possible. The CBDC revolution, if it arrives, will be a step in the right direction. But the destination is a system in which everything you own that holds liquid value can function as money in the moment you need it to. That is not a revolution in digital currency, it is a revolution in what we understand as money.
I want to know what this community thinks of interoperability, so please comment below. Follow me on socials to join the debate.
The definition of money, like most foundational ideas in economics, has not changed much since William Stanley Jevons codified it in 1875. The six characteristics of money —durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, and acceptability— have served as the standard ever since, a framework so durable that it survived the shift from gold to paper, from paper to plastic, and from plastic to the first generation of digital payments without requiring meaningful revision. What has changed, or shifted, is the range of assets those characteristics can now be applied to. When Satoshi Nakamoto mined Bitcoin's genesis block in 2009, embedding in its code a headline about the fragility of the banking system he was building an alternative to, it marked the first serious challenge to a definition that had gone uncontested for over a century.
For the first decade, that challenge was largely philosophical. Today, it is structural, and the six characteristics that Jevons defined are being stress-tested by assets he could never have imagined.
Durability
The original concern was physical. Gold doesn't rust. Paper money deteriorates. Commodity currencies spoil. For most of monetary history, durability was a question of whether the medium of exchange could survive long enough to be used again. Digital infrastructure movies the question away from the physical properties of a medium and toward the systemic robustness of the network that carries it. Well-established blockchain networks have demonstrated a form of durability that many traditional financial systems, built on aging technology and single points of failure, struggle to match. In a digital context, durability is no longer a constraint. It is a baseline.
Portability
For centuries, portability meant how easily you could carry value across physical space. For Gold and cash that principle is easily applied. Wire transfers can also be moved, but have been slow, expensive, and dependent on correspondent banking relationships. Consider how portable a wire transfer actually is. Sending money across borders can take several days, involves multiple financial institutions, and extracts fees at every touchpoint. But move the same value in stablecoins and the transaction settles in minutes, globally, at a fraction of the cost. Value that once required institutional mediation to move can now travel as freely as an email.
Divisibility
Traditional money divides well. Most real-world assets do not. You cannot spend a third of a share, transact in fractional real estate, or deploy a partial bond position to make a payment. The indivisibility of assets has always been one of the primary reasons they don't function as money, even when they hold significant value. But when an asset exists on a blockchain, it can be divided to whatever granularity the protocol allows. A far-reaching principle as it removes the barrier that has historically kept entire asset classes out of the monetary conversation. Thanks to the blockchain, fractional ownership of real estate, equities and commodities is possible. An asset once too coarse to function as a medium of exchange can, once tokenized, transact in increments smaller than a cent.
Uniformity
For money to work, each unit must be interchangeable with every other. A dollar is a dollar regardless of which bill it's printed on. In a similar vein, each token representing a share in a money market fund is, by the logic of the blockchain that records it, identical to every other token in that same fund; a form of enforced uniformity that physical assets, with their variations in condition, provenance, and authenticity, have never been able to guarantee. Within a given tokenized system, uniformity is an architectural property.
Limited supply
Scarcity has always been a foundational principle to monetary value. Currencies inflate when supply is unconstrained, and Gold held its value in part because producing more of it was genuinely difficult. But to pose an example of digital assets, unlike fiat, Bitcoin's supply is fixed at 21 million by the mathematics embedded in its very protocol, making it immutable and publicly verifiable by anyone at any time. For the first time, scarcity was programmed rather than simply promised. The market is already sorting the credible assets with transparent, verifiable supply constraints that are attracting institutional capital, from those without, which face the fate of every currency that has ever been inflated into irrelevance.
Acceptability
This has always been the hardest characteristic to engineer and the easiest to lose. A currency is only money if people accept it, which is partly rational, partly social, and, fundamentally, backed by institutions. Today, digital assets are undoubtedly gaining acceptability, but the speed at which institutional infrastructure is being built around them is truly remarkable. Custody solutions, settlement rails, regulatory frameworks, and payment integrations are lowering the barrier to adoption for both retail and institutional participants. Stablecoins are already being used for cross-border payments, treasury operations, and everyday transactions in markets where traditional infrastructure is slow or inaccessible. Acceptability is not yet “universal”, but it is accelerating faster than most would have predicted even five years ago.
For the first time in monetary history, the six characteristics of money offer a framework that can be satisfied by a far broader range of assets. A tokenized equity, a stablecoin, a digitized dollar demonstrate durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, and acceptability in ways that would have been technically impossible a generation ago. But meeting the six characteristics individually is not, it turns out, sufficient. An asset can pass every one of Jevons' tests and still fail the most important one of all: the ability to move freely, convert instantly, and interact with other assets across the fragmented ecosystems that make up the modern financial system. That condition has no name in the 1875 textbook. Today, I call it interoperability.
Interoperability is not necessarily a feature, but rather the precondition for everything to work as one. A tokenized asset that meets all six of Jevons' characteristics but cannot move freely between networks, jurisdictions, and use cases is technically trapped, limited. The six characteristics of money describe what an asset is, whereas interoperability determines what it can do. Take the internet, for example. It didn’t reshape the world because information became digital, it reshaped the world because common protocols allowed it to move freely across previously isolated systems. The value was therefore, not in digitization, but in its connectivity.
Finance is approaching the same point. The tokenization race now underway across Wall Street is the digitization phase. What comes next is connectivity, and with it, infrastructure capable of moving value freely across blockchains, asset classes, and settlement systems, collapsing the chain of liquidation, intermediaries, and settlement delays. Today, deploying an asset in a transaction still requires that chain, regardless of whether the underlying asset is tokenized. Interoperability removes it. Conversion happens at the point of transaction and the asset goes directly to the payment.
This is the problem ForumPay is built to solve: to build the payment rails that make asset class irrelevant. Whether it is Bitcoin, a digitized dollar, or a tokenized equity position, the infrastructure will handle the payment, transaction, conversion because it’s dealing with fungible value, not separate assets. The fabric that allows that to happen is connectivity. If the six characteristics of money tell us what money must be, interoperability is becoming the condition without which none of the others fully count.
