Four people are standing outside a pub near Monument on a Thursday evening, about to take the first sip of their third Helles.

“What do you do?” one says to the rest.

“I work in tokenisation.”

“Oh,” says the man next to him, “so do I.”

And unbelievably, the other two say the same.

“Well, this is awkward,” the first man says. “We must be competitors.”

Two rounds later, after a fair amount of exposition and a couple of trips to the toilet, that same man finally says:

“Wow. We don’t do the same thing at all.”

No word in finance is doing more work right now, or less of it. A fund administrator, a stablecoin issuer and a private credit platform compete for oxygen around a single term. (And this doesn’t even get into the many non-finance versions of the term.) It’s a mess or, more rightly, a messaging nightmare. 

Securitise calls itself the world’s leader in tokenising real-world assets, and runs funds with Apollo, BlackRock and KKR. Figure calls itself the market leader in real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation, and means home equity loans on its own blockchain. J.P. Morgan describes Kinexys as its industry-leading blockchain business unit with $4 trillion in corporate cash transactions. Ondo is a leading tokenised real-world asset platform, and means 200-odd Teslas and Nvidias wrapped for people who cannot open a brokerage account. Overlapping phrases describe different businesses, and there is no liar in the bunch.

Time to untangle.

Equities. These are stocks, upgraded. Unlike traditional vehicles, they can trade around the clock, in fractional increments, and be settled nearly instantaneously. As described, no one would be against that, but deeper considerations remain. What exactly has been tokenised – and what rights do the holders of the token have? Robinhood’s European launch ran into debates when OpenAI disowned the “shares” being traded in its name.

Payments. Here the token stands in for money, and the buyer is a corporate treasurer who wants a dollar to move on a Sunday afternoon. Some are stablecoins, which are claims on a pool of reserves held by a non-bank issuer, redeemable at par and transferable to anyone with a wallet. Others are bank-run deposit tokens, which are ordinary bank deposits written to a ledger. Tokenised payments are very different things at Circle and at Kinexys. The pitch is boredom: fewer failed settlements, less cash trapped overnight in a correspondent bank. The danger here is that a meaningful incremental improvement collides with excitable talk about a “complete revolution” in payment.

Real-world assets. Private credit, warehouses, carbon credits, the occasional vineyard. The token represents a claim on something that previously wasn’t easily tradable on a larger market. Here the primary questions are around valuation. There’s a reason why individual bottles of wine have been valued one at a time. Further discussion questions: Who strikes the valuation? What happens when the borrower stops paying?

Digitally-native securities. Instruments with no off-chain twin: bonds issued directly onto a ledger, funds that exist only in that form, collateral that was never paper. This is a truly new horizon, and people in this space need to justify their existence and the gap the process fills in the market.

The problem with communications is that people in the business see the differences as self-evident, while most of the public lump it into some ill-defined basket of tokens. You can blame people for their ignorance, or communicate only within a small group of experts. But realistically, I think sharper writing can help here.

First off, lead with the audience. I see far too much “you” on booths and front pages, even when you might be referring to a billion-dollar corporation or someone sending a $15 remittance. Make sure to qualify and describe exactly who benefits.

Then the problems. Payments in particular can get stuck in the murky realm of “seamlessness,” which I have instructed my editing bot to always throw away. The issue is that people have been claiming this for decades, yet we never quite get to the Milk & Honey Route entrepreneurs promised. Say exactly what is better than how things were before, or even better, how you are better than the company down the street.

Resist the urge to adjective-stack. This is common-sense writing, but tokenisation seems to gravitate toward piling useless words on top of words. When press releases, be they descriptive text or quotes, seem to point in that direction, take a red pen to the fat and find something better to say.

Instead, go with the detail. Tokenisation at scale is a fascinating issue, one that has required the brilliant effort of many economists, engineers, academics and quants of all shapes. Tell that story: what it took to get there and what’s going on now.

And finally, learn from journalists.

Look at these two examples from a single Decrypt story this week, discussing a BlackRock-Ondo tie-up:

“The biggest financial institutions in the world are bringing more products on-chain, and the pace is accelerating.”

“The tokenisation pitch has always been the same: take a thing that exists, put it on a blockchain, make it move faster.”

That’s the type of copy people will understand, no matter how many pints in.

Jon Schubin is the head of content at Cognito