The Era of Stocks Is Coming to an End 

These New “Tokens” Will Soon Replace Stock Certificates.

Imagine if you had a picture of Mickey Mouse on your phone, just like the image below, and that this picture served as proof that you owned shares in The Walt Disney Co. 

Now, imagine if this picture not only signified that you owned shares, but it contained special coding that identified exactly which shares belonged to you… and more coding that delivered your quarterly dividends directly to the wallet on your phone. 

This world is fast emerging… 

I write to you regularly about the non-fungible tokens I own—the so-called NFTs that are one-off, one-of-a-kind cryptocurrencies. And I regularly share with you the income I’m earning off the portfolio of NFTs I hold. 

Today’s dispatch goes a step beyond… 

See, while NFTs can be a bit goofy, the reality is that they increasingly represent very real businesses. And those businesses, in turn, are earning very real profits that they then turn around and share with holders of the NFTs in the form of a “crypto dividend,” known in the crypto space as a distribution. 

And that’s where the picture of Mickey comes into play. 

Traditional finance institutions such as JPMorgan, Citi, and others are eagerly pushing for the “tokenization” of Wall Street, which might sound like a very odd phrase if you’re not down with the crypto lingo… 

Tokenization is the process of taking something and turning it into a digital asset that lives on the blockchain, the digital highway on which all cryptocurrencies operate. 

Right now, stock certificates are largely digital in that they exist as entries on some electronic register held and operated by some back-office firm that handles the movement of stocks from seller to buyer. 

But that is very different from existing on the blockchain. 

As it is at the moment, when you buy a share of stock, there are middlemen all along the process, such as stockbrokers… the market-makers executing trades on the stock exchange… those back-office companies keeping track of who own which shares… and others. 

It’s an expensive and time-consuming spectrum between you buying a share of Disney and a share of Disney landing in your brokerage account… and then you collecting dividends that Disney spins out over time. 

On the blockchain, there’s no need for any of that. 

When I buy an NFT, I just head to a site like Magic Eden or OpenSea, find the NFT I want, click “buy,” and it’s done. 

The NFT automatically lands in my crypto wallet literally seconds later, and the seller gets his money in those same seconds. 

And because the NFT I hold is on the blockchain, there is no need for a third party to keep track of who owns what, and which trades were made. The blockchain does that automatically. 

Similarly, NFT projects can send out distributions to NFT holders near instantaneously and with minimal organizational effort. It’s all very quick and wildly inexpensive… fractions of a cent per NFT. 

Wall Street realizes the cost savings that are staring them in the face if they adopt this model. If they can move stocks and bonds and real estate and other physical assets onto the blockchain and turn them into digital assets, the traditional finance industry can save tens and hundreds of millions of dollars annually. 

Which means this isn’t conjecture on my part.  

It means this is a done deal.  

Just a matter of time, really. 

Which means that we’re increasingly close to the point when Disney and Microsoft and Merck and all other Wall Street stocks became NFTs. 

But as I noted above, the early iteration of that world already exists today. 

Scores of NFTs exist that pay out distributions every day, every week, or every month. I’ve written about this in previous dispatches over the last several months, but I’ve earned about $3,250 so far this year from NFT distributions, an annualized return of about 27%.… and not all my NFTs are paying out fully yet.  

This idea of NFT income is a topic near and dear to my wallet as a crypto investor—so much so that I’m giving a presentation on this at the International Living Ultimate Go Overseas Bootcamp in September. I want you to be early to this game… to be prepared for what’s coming. Being ahead of the curve is where you can exploit your knowledge for profits as newcomers play catchup. 

I’ll be offering examples of where I’m earning money in NFTs and crypto today, and explaining how it is that companies spin out money to those of us who hold pictures that looks like these… 

I realize that some folks can’t get their head around this world. But better to start learning about it now, because this is the future of finance.

I’m willing to bet that the picture of Mickey I used to launch this column—or something similar to that—will one day very soon represent Disney on Wall Street.