At present, the world of crypto is still small and exclusive, mostly removed from the world’s mainstream societies. The things most people use in their lives every day - fiat money, consumer products, physical assets like cars or property - do not at present touch a blockchain in almost any measure.
But the writing is on the wall that this will change, with Facebook’s Libra perhaps being the most notable recent exhibition of blockchain’s looming entrance into our real lives. One of the world’s most powerful corporations issuing their own currency is definitely ruffling feathers, and highlights the main problem with tokenizing anything besides a public crypto like Bitcoin: you quickly you into an array of legal systems, and the governments behind them.
But inroads are starting to be made in broad tokenization of human life using blockchains. This trend more or less describes the ethos of Lykke, a Switzerland-based company whose goal is to “[build] a marketplace that integrates seamlessly with the existing financial system.” Lykke imagine this marketplace to host the trading of as many types of assets as possible, from cryptocurrencies and tokens through to fiat money, and into more exotic assets like property.
Most outwardly, Lykke is a still-in-beta exchange, whose tradable assets already include a healthy variety of cryptos and fiat money asset pairings. The four base pairings are USD, Swiss francs (CHF), Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), and hundreds of assets are tradable against those four base assets. Cryptos and fiat mingle interchangeably on one, alphabetically organized list, again reflecting Lykke’s ambitions.