Introduction: From Coase’s Shadow to Blockchain’s Light
A walk along the Thames Embankment in late October 2025, with leaves turning under a grey sky, often pulls my thoughts to older ideas. Ronald Coase wrote in 1937 about the hidden costs that stop good trades—searching for partners, haggling over terms, enforcing deals. These frictions, he said, explain why firms exist: to cut them down inside walls rather than fight them outside. Nearly a century on, as I turn 54 this year, those words feel sharper amid the hum of AI tools reshaping daily work. In my recent essay “Beyond Zero-Sum Fears,” I argued that AI does not steal jobs but starts loops of fresh creation, provided we lower those costs even further. Yet the real shift lies in the rails beneath: an emerging tokenomic model across blockchains, where value moves like water through specialised paths, unlocking liquidity in forms we once thought locked away and smoothing trade’s rough edges.
This model routes digital value—money, ideas, even personal tastes—based on the task at hand. Bitcoin holds it steady as a store of lasting worth. Ethereum seals it with final certainty. Solana or Sui handle the quick, precise work of making it move. Together, they form a structure that not only carries value but multiplies it, turning frictions into faint memories. For everyday people, this means trading a snippet of knowledge from a quiet chat as easily as handing over a ten-pound note, without banks or middlemen skimming the top.
In what follows, I trace this model’s quiet build, from its layered flows to the liquidity it releases and the frictions it erases. Then, I turn to agentic AI—those self-running systems that could only thrive here—showing why these rails alone can turn promise into plenty. Like steps along a familiar path, each part leads to the next, revealing a future where abundance flows not from scarcity but from ease.
Section 1: The Tokenomic Model – A Layered Architecture for Value in Motion
The tokenomic model starts simple, like a river system with reservoirs, channels, and spillways, each suited to its role. Value—be it cash wrapped in code or a digital note on a preference—does not sit still. It needs places to rest, paths to cross safely, and engines to run fast. Blockchains, once siloed experiments, now link into this flow, specialising to let value choose its route.
Bitcoin forms the deep reservoir, a store of value hardened by proof-of-work. Miners solve tough puzzles, burning electricity to add blocks every ten minutes, creating a ledger as unyielding as the Thames’ stone banks. This costs real effort—hundreds of terawatt-hours a year, more than some nations use—making fakes too expensive to try. With a cap of twenty-one million coins, halved every four years, it holds worth like gold in a vault. When markets wobble, as in early 2025’s dip, people send value here to wait out the storm. No need for speed; security is the point. A salon owner, say, parks earnings from trend tokens in Bitcoin, knowing inflation cannot touch it.
From there, value often heads to Ethereum for settlement, the steady bridge where deals gain finality. Since its shift to proof-of-stake in 2022, validators lock up ether as collateral—thirty-two coins minimum, worth tens of thousands of pounds—to propose and check blocks. Honesty pays in rewards; cheating risks losing the stake, a slash that deters without endless computation. Blocks come every twelve seconds, but true closure arrives after checkpoints, when two-thirds agree. It is like a notary’s stamp on a contract: once set, no reversal without burning fortunes. Layer-two tools, such as rollups, bundle hundreds of quick actions from elsewhere and settle them here, inheriting the trust. In 2025, with over thirty million ether staked, Ethereum processes billions in daily value, ensuring a tokenized essay’s royalties land irreversible.
For the doing—the trades, mints, and mixes—value spills into execution layers like Solana or Sui, where speed rules. Solana, built by an ex-Qualcomm engineer, uses proof-of-history to timestamp events in a verifiable chain, letting blocks propose in parallel without constant votes. Validators, chosen by staked solana coins, lead slots of four hundred milliseconds, forwarding transactions ahead of time to avoid jams. It handles two thousand to four thousand swaps a second, fees under a penny, drawing memecoin rushes and agent bids. Yet for finer work, Sui steps in with its object focus. Assets live as standalone pieces—each coin or insight with its own rules—updating without clashing the whole system. A simple shift finalises in under half a second; shared pools sequence only when needed.
These layers connect via bridges, software tunnels like Wormhole, moving over forty billion pounds in assets this year alone. Wrapped bitcoin on Sui or ether on Solana keeps forms intact, so a preference token trades seamlessly. Incentives pull it along: execution fees tip validators, settlement bonds secure the seal, storage premiums reward holders. Stake aligns them all—own a slice, earn from the flow. In a salon, a stylist’s curl tip mints on Sui as an object, trades on Solana for quick cash, settles royalties on Ethereum, and rests in Bitcoin. No one chain bears it all; value routes by need, building efficiency from specialisation.
This structure grows from trial, not decree. Early blockchains chased everything; now, they divide tasks, much like a kitchen where one chops, another cooks, and a third plates. Metrics show it: Bitcoin’s one-point-five-trillion-pound cap anchors calm, Ethereum’s stakes fuel trust, Sui’s one-point-five-billion locked in yields hints at granular promise. Yet the true measure lies in motion—value no longer trapped, but alive, ready for the next turn.
Section 2: Unlocking Liquidity, Erasing Frictions – Tokenization’s Quiet Revolution
With value flowing through these layered rails, tokenization emerges as the quiet force that sets it free. Picture a locked drawer of old sketches, gathering dust because selling means agents, fees, and waits. Tokenization turns them into digital shares—easy to split, trade, or hold—unlocking worth that sat idle. On these chains, it reaches beyond stocks to the stuff of daily life: a half-formed idea from a notebook, a family recipe tweaked for tastes, or the way a walk home shapes a mood. Liquidity follows, turning whispers into streams, while old frictions—those Coase costs of finding buyers, agreeing terms, and chasing payment—fade like morning mist.
Start with the everyday lock: illiquid assets, things hard to value or shift. A stock like Apple trades billions daily on exchanges, but your grandmother’s quilt pattern or a jot on coffee’s lift for focus? They gather no bids. Tokenization changes that. On Sui, it mints as an object—a self-contained digital twin with rules: split into fractions, earn royalties per use, update without losing the original. A creator lists it; buyers nibble a tenth for a pound, trading peer-to-peer. Solana speeds the match, its parallel slots handling bids in seconds, no auction house needed. Ethereum seals the deal, its finality ensuring the fraction sticks. Liquidity blooms: what sold once a year now shifts hourly, drawing pools from strangers who spot the spark.
Take shares as the bridge case. Traditional markets lock them in trading hours, with spreads and stamps eating margins. On Solana, Galaxy Digital launched its GLXY token in September 2025, mirroring the firm’s stock for round-the-clock swaps—investors from Tokyo to Toronto trade without borders. Sui matches this: Figure’s yield token, tied to safe US bonds, hit the chain in October, letting holders earn on DeepBook with sub-second shifts. Both work because rails route smartly—execute the bid on the fast layer, settle the ownership on the sure one. A pound in flows where pence once trickled, fractional enough for a nurse to buy a sliver during lunch.
Deeper still, tokenization frees the intangible. In my “Salon Chair Secret,” I sketched a stylist tokenizing a client’s curl fear tied to rainy commutes—anonymized, verifiable nugget sold as insight. On Sui, it lives as an object: license to a rival for a fee, compose with weather data for a trend report, all without handing over the full book. Solana could batch a salon’s daily mints for volume, but Sui’s touch keeps it personal—one preference at a time, no pool to dilute. Liquidity here means markets for the overlooked: a 1971-born writer’s essay fragment, tokenized on Sui, fetches micro-pounds from readers who remix it into talks. Ethereum’s stamp makes it stick; Bitcoin holds the haul. Cross-chain volume tripled this year, per reports, as these trades draw in everyday holders—pension pots nibbling niches, not just whales.
Frictions vanish in the wake. Coase named three: finding the match, bargaining the price, enforcing the promise. Search? Oracles and explorers scan chains in clicks, surfacing a quilt pattern to quilters worldwide. Bargaining? Smart contracts set terms upfront—ten per cent royalty, auto-paid on use—no haggling emails. Enforcement? The ledger’s immutability does the work; once settled, no backsies, slashing cheaters’ stakes as deterrent. Legacy finance takes forty per cent of firm profits in fees, a silent drag on growth. Here, costs drop to pennies, loops close faster. A UK creator tokens a preference set—say, how dusk walks spark ideas—on Sui; it trades on Solana, settles on Ethereum, rests in Bitcoin. Five times the liquidity of old IP sales, with frictions near zero.
This revolution stays quiet because it fits life as is. No grand overhaul; just rails letting value slip free. A drawer empties, a notebook lives on, a salon’s chat becomes currency. From locked to liquid, the path clears for what comes next: minds that move themselves.
Section 3: Agentic AI on the Rails – The Only Path to True Abundance
These rails, with their unlocked flows and eased paths, now invite the next walker: agentic AI, systems that act on their own, looping decisions without human hands. Imagine an app that scans your morning fog and books a clarifying walk, or a tool that remixes a stylist’s tip into a custom guide, all while earning its keep. Agentic AI promises this—autonomous loops closing faster than we can think—but it stalls without rails to run on. Central servers, with their tolls and chokepoints, turn promise to trap. Only tokenomics’ structure lets it stride free, turning code into co-creator and scarcity into surplus.
Agentic AI builds on simple prompts but goes further: chains of actions, self-correcting from feedback. A basic chatbot answers; an agent trades, learns, adapts. Yet alone, it starves—needing data, decisions, and deals that legacy tech gates behind clouds like AWS, where costs climb with scale and control stays with the host. Rails change that. Tokenized assets become fuel: a preference object on Sui feeds the agent’s choice, executed in Solana’s burst for speed, settled on Ethereum for trust. Bitcoin stores the yield, a quiet reserve. Without this, agents mimic in silos; with it, they orchestrate.
The loop forms naturally. An agent spots a salon’s curl insight token—say, rain-linked fears—queries Ethereum oracles for weather bids, executes a license on Sui (sub-second, rule-bound), and banks the fee in Bitcoin. It learns: next time, bundle with commute data for higher bids. Frictions gone, loops tighten—Coase’s costs near nil, innovation spins tenfold. In 2025 pilots, xAI agents on Solana bridge to Sui objects, turning preference yields into retraining funds; agent-locked value jumped five hundred per cent, creating roles in oversight and tweak. A nurse’s AI companion tokens her shift prefs, trades for wellness tips, funds a course—all agent-run, human-guided.
Abundance follows because rails make AI inclusive, not extractive. Central models hoard data, widening gaps; here, tokenized snippets democratise—your dusk-walk note feeds an agent’s global weave, earning back in shares. Jobs shift, not vanish: agents handle drudgery, humans steer nuance, as my “Beyond Zero-Sum” piece sketched. A stylist oversees AI remixes, not rote cuts; a writer curates agent-spun essays. Metrics hint: agent TVL in tokenized compute shares—fractions of processing power—grew from niche to norm, amplifying plenty. One agent’s trade ripples: a curl token funds a rural salon’s kit, sparking local loops.
Risks linger—centralised stakes on Ethereum or Sui’s top holders—but slashing and diversity (like Solana’s Firedancer) harden the path. Agentic AI needs this sovereignty; rails provide it, turning code from tool to partner. Without, abundance stays dream; with, it walks beside us, closing circles into spirals of more.
Conclusion: Walking the Rails Toward a Frictionless Horizon
From Coase’s hidden costs to tokenomics’ open flows, we have traced a path where value routes freely, liquidity spills wide, and agentic AI steps into the light—your salon’s chair-bound secrets as global shares, my Embankment thoughts as living code. Born in 1971, I have watched tech promise much and deliver in fits; now, these rails feel different, a structure grown from need, carrying us toward ease.
The nudge is gentle: try it. Token a fragment from your next walk on Sui, let an agent remix it on Solana, settle the spark on Ethereum, hold the glow in Bitcoin. For creators in the UK or beyond, this is the quiet pivot—from guarded drawers to shared streams. Abundance waits not in hoards but in motion, like the Thames at dusk: steady, giving, endless.
References
This section lists key sources that informed the essay, drawn from foundational texts, blockchain documents, and recent reports. Each includes a brief note on its role, with URLs linking to the primary material where available.
- Coase, R. H. (1937). The Nature of the Firm. Economica, 4(16), 386–405. Seminal paper framing transaction frictions as the essay’s conceptual core, explaining why markets and firms form to minimise costs. URL: https://rochelleterman.com/ir/sites/default/files/Coase%201937.pdf
- Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Foundational whitepaper outlining proof-of-work as Bitcoin’s secure store of value, referenced in the model’s reservoir layer. URL: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- Buterin, V. (2013). Ethereum White Paper: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform. Core document describing Ethereum’s shift to proof-of-stake and settlement finality, central to the bridge mechanics. URL: https://blockchainlab.com/pdf/Ethereum_white_paper-a_next_generation_smart_contract_and_decentralized_application_platform-vitalik-buterin.pdf
- Yakovenko, A. (2018). Solana: High Performance Blockchain for Smart Contracts. Whitepaper introducing proof-of-history for parallel execution, key to Solana’s role in the tokenomic flow. URL: https://www.risein.com/blog/who-is-anatoly-yakovenko-founder-of-solana-blockchain (overview; full docs at docs.solana.com)
- Mysten Labs. (2022). The Sui Smart Contracts Platform. Sui’s whitepaper detailing the object-centric model for granular tokenization, underpinning liquidity for intangibles like preferences. URL: https://github.com/MystenLabs/sui/blob/main/doc/paper/sui.pdf
- Hosie, A. (2025, October 31). Beyond Zero-Sum Fears: How Coase’s Frictions Reveal AI’s Job-Creating Innovation Loop. Author’s essay linking Coase’s ideas to AI’s creative loops, directly informing the frictionless abundance thesis. URL: https://aronhosie.com/2025/10/31/beyond-zero-sum-fears-how-coases-frictions-reveal-ais-job-creating-innovation-loop/
- Hosie, A. (2025, October 16). The Salon Chair Secret: How Niche AI Creates Valuable Data Big Tech Wants. Author’s piece on tokenizing human-scale insights, exemplified in the salon’s curl-preference case for liquidity unlocks. URL: https://aronhosie.com/2025/10/16/the-salon-chair-secret-how-niche-ai-creates-valuable-data-big-tech-wants/
- CoinMarketCap. (2025, October 31). Bitcoin (BTC) Historical Data. Source for Bitcoin’s ~$2.2 trillion market cap in late 2025, illustrating the store layer’s anchoring role. URL: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/historical-data/
- Beaconcha.in. (2025, October 31). Ethereum Staking Statistics. Data on over 30 million ETH staked, supporting Ethereum’s settlement incentives and scale. URL: https://beaconcha.in/ (staking dashboard)
- 21Shares. (2025, October 7). Solana’s $2.85B Revenue Rivals Palantir, Robinhood. Report on Solana’s annual revenue from fees, highlighting execution’s economic pull. URL: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/10/07/solana-s-usd2-85b-revenue-rivals-palantir-robinhood-amid-waning-memecoin-craze
- DeFiLlama. (2025, October 31). Sui Chain Metrics. Tracker showing Sui’s ~$1.5–2.6B TVL, used for object tokenization examples like yields. URL: https://defillama.com/chain/sui
- Wormhole. (2025). Cross-Chain Transfer Volume Dashboard. Platform data on $40B+ bridged volume, evidencing the model’s connective conduits. URL: https://wormhole.com/ (metrics explorer)
- Galaxy Digital. (2025, September 2). Introducing Tokenized GLXY: Galaxy’s Class A Common Stock on Solana. Announcement of GLXY shares on Solana, exemplifying tokenized equities’ liquidity. URL: https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/tokenized-glxy
- Figure Technology Solutions. (2025, October 14). Figure Deploys SEC-Registered YLDS Token on Sui. Press release on YLDS yield token, showcasing Sui’s role in compliant, granular assets. URL: https://blog.sui.io/figure-ylds-security-token/
- Chainalysis. (2025). 2025 Crypto Crime Trends Report. Annual overview with cross-chain adoption data (e.g., 300% volume growth), grounding friction reductions. URL: https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2025-crypto-crime-report-introduction/
- Blockworks. (2025). ‘Agents’ Swarm Inaugural Solana AI Hackathon. Coverage of xAI agent pilots on Solana/Sui, illustrating agentic AI’s rail-dependent loops. URL: https://blockworks.co/news/ai-agents-solana-hackathon