This post is a bit different than my usual "get better at distribution" ranting, but important nonetheless. It's about choices and the future.
There’s a dangerous idea spreading quietly across the Web3 and internet — one that hides beneath the language of innovation, empowerment, and progress.
It’s the belief that everything should be tokenized.
Art, writing, images, music.
Then houses, data, reputation, even time.
Every human activity reduced to a tradable unit of value.
At first glance, it sounds like democratization — giving more people access to ownership, liquidity, and financial freedom.
But look closer, and you’ll see that something far more corrosive is happening underneath.
We are taking additive systems — where people create, build, and express — and turning them into zero-sum markets where we trade, speculate, and extract.
Tokenization doesn’t always create value.
Often, it just moves value around to those who can extract faster and better. (Hint: it's not You!)
And when you start moving things around faster than they’re being made, you end up with financialization — not innovation.
Here’s a simple way to see the difference.
Doctors give pills. Builders build houses. Artists make art.
Each creates something new that wasn’t there before.
Traders, on the other hand, don’t create — they reallocate. They move ownership and pricing around. In the best case, they provide liquidity and discovery; in the worst, they feed volatility and extract fees.
The problem isn’t trading itself. Markets are vital for coordination and efficiency.
The problem begins when everything becomes a market
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Because markets are inherently zero-sum.
For someone to win, someone else must lose.
And that logic — when imported into creativity, culture, or social systems — starts eating away at their purpose from the inside.
Every system evolves toward its incentives.
When you create something, you’re usually rewarded by feedback: attention, appreciation, maybe income or recognition. It’s a delayed and qualitative reward.
When you tokenize something, you create a price — and that price becomes the dominant feedback loop.
Suddenly, the question shifts from “Is this meaningful?” to “What’s this worth right now?”
And that’s the moment creative energy collapses into financial energy.
Instead of writing to express truth, you mint to optimize for hype.
Instead of painting to explore form, you release another drop because the floor price went down.
Instead of collaborating, you compete for liquidity.
Once the price mechanism becomes visible, it dominates behavior.
You can’t unsee it.
That’s why the “tokens for everything” movement feels hollow to me — and I like trading! It’s not expanding creativity or ownership. It’s reducing everything to tradability — and tradability is not the same as value.
Ironically, NFTs were a step in the right direction — even though they’re technically tokens too.
NFTs were non-fungible. They stood for something unique.
A one-of-one piece of art, an idea, a song, a story — they added something new to the world.
They were weird, experimental, and expressive. Most weren’t “valuable” in the financial sense, but they were meaningful in the cultural sense.
In that early period, NFTs represented an additive movement. They gave digital artists a way to claim authorship, form communities, and fund their craft without middlemen. Some teams took it to heart and ran with it - remember YugaLabs? Seen their latest ApeFest!
Then, the system did what systems do — it optimized for volume.
Fungible tokens returned. Points, drops, mints, rewards, liquidity programs.
Every interaction became a potential transaction. Every creative act became a chance to farm. Every platform became an exchange.
And just like that, the creative abundance of NFTs was replaced by the financial engineering of fungible tokens.
The same logic that once made DeFi interesting — composable money games — started invading creative ecosystems.
The result: a reversion to the mean of zero-sum finance.
This is not unique to Web3.
The same dynamic happened in the real economy decades ago.
When finance becomes the primary driver of value, production slows and speculation accelerates.
We saw it in the housing market, in Wall Street derivatives, and in the explosion of asset bubbles everywhere.
Every new idea eventually got wrapped into a financial product — bundled, leveraged, and traded.
Value creation turned into value extraction.
People stopped asking, “What are we building?” and started asking, “What’s the yield?”
That’s the same trap we’re walking into with tokenization.
When you tokenize creativity, you don’t get more art — you get more financialized representations of art.
When you tokenize community, you don’t get stronger bonds — you get price-sensitive tribes.
When you tokenize reputation, you don’t get trust — you get performative signalling and manipulation.
When overused, finance is a parasite. It needs a host.
It doesn’t build; it feeds on what’s already built.
So unless a token is backed by something truly additive — new energy, innovation, coordination, or cultural creation — it’s just a financial instrument disguised as progress.
Let’s contrast.
An additive system produces more value than it consumes. It grows the pie.
Open-source software. Scientific discovery. Renewable infrastructure. Education.
Even art — when created sincerely — adds depth, meaning, and coherence to human experience.
A zero-sum system redistributes existing value. It grows nothing.
Speculation. Arbitrage. Ponzi economics. Trading fees - the only real winner.
These systems can exist for coordination, but when they dominate, they erode.
Tokenization could, in theory, serve additive systems — for example:
Funding open research through transparent collective ownership.
Coordinating local energy networks or regenerative agriculture.
Enabling artists to capture long-term royalties from their work.
But the vast majority of current implementations don’t do that.
They take additive domains and convert them into markets for trading.
That’s why it feels like progress but tastes like despair.
Because deep down, we sense it’s extractive, not creative.
If you’ve ever built something from scratch — a business, a song, a community — you know the emotional difference between creating and trading.
Creation gives meaning.
Trading gives dopamine.
Creation is slow, uncertain, often invisible for a while.
Trading is fast, measurable, and socially visible.
The tokenization wave appeals to our impatience.
It promises instant feedback, visible metrics, and market validation.
But it replaces purpose with price — and once price enters the room, purpose quietly leaves.
I believe that’s why many in crypto feel burned out, cynical, and alienated.
We didn’t sign up to become high-frequency liquidity providers.
We signed up to build a new internet — one that rewarded participation, not speculation.
The current tokenization wave — led by platforms like Zora, Base, Paragraph, and others, including big TredFi players — will likely backfire on its most loyal supporters.
Because you can’t financialize meaning forever.
The speculative layer eventually collapses back onto the real one — and if there’s nothing real underneath, it implodes.
It happened with ICOs in 2017.
It happened with DeFi yield farms in 2020.
It’s happening again with the “tokenize everything” movement.
The tragedy is that the people who get hurt most are not the whales or the platforms — it’s the creators, the communities, small early adopters who genuinely believed in the promise of a more participatory internet.
So what’s the alternative?
We don’t need to reject tokens entirely. Technology is not the problem.
We need to reframe what they represent and how we use them.
Instead of turning every human action into a market, we should be designing systems that reward creation, contribution, and collaboration — not speculation.
That might mean:
Designing tokens that decay unless used for creation or coordination.
Rebuilding social platforms that measure meaning, not market value.
Rewarding networks for producing open knowledge, not just on-chain transactions.
... (tell me what else?)
The next phase of the internet shouldn’t be about tokenizing everything.
It should be about valuing creation again — protecting the spaces where humans can make something new without immediately being turned into liquidity. Early experiments showed promise, let's get back to them.
If Web3 is to mean anything, we have to evolve it beyond finance and trading.
Otherwise, it will remain just another tool for overfinancialization — a prettier, wilder — but still just a casino.
The dream wasn’t “everything on-chain.”
The dream was “everyone empowered to create, new economy, more access.”
NFTs gave us a glimpse of that world — messy, human, full of expression.
Fungible tokens for everything, in their current form, are dragging us back into the old one — mechanistic, financialized, extractive.
If we continue on this path, we’ll wake up one day to find that we’ve built an internet where everything is tradable, but nothing is meaningful.
And that would be the ultimate failure — not of technology, but of imagination.
This is big, and for some, very emotional topic. I'd really like to hear your thoughts - hit reply on that email, find me on X or Farcaster and let me know what you think. How can we improve this dire situation?
Let's BUILD BETTER future!
BFG
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The article paints a stark vision — where tokenization flattens value into speculation, and communities dissolve into games of extraction. But at c3, we’re building toward a different future. One not of zero-sum, but of circular flow. Not where everything is monetized — but where what matters moves. Our model reframes value away from ownership and into activation. Each token, each artwork, each contribution is ritualized, resonant, and purposeful. In the c3 DAO, tokens like the c3 Key and projects like Priceless Art do not tokenize for profit — they encode relationship, access, and continuity. They don’t represent what you own; they reflect how you show up. We believe web3 is not the end of community. It’s the ritual architecture that helps it begin again — with memory, beauty, and breath. Let’s build for abundance — not by inflating markets, but by restoring meaning. — c3 Connect · Contribute · Create #c3DAO #RegenerativeWeb3 #PricelessArt #CulturalDAOs #TokenMeaningfully
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While everyone’s busy tokenizing the future, few are asking if that’s the future we actually want. I wrote this because I think we’re confusing innovation with financialization. When creation becomes a market, meaning gets priced out. Read the full reflection here ↓ https://paragraph.com/@buildbetter/the-zero-sum-future-of-tokenized-everything