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.
