Earlier this year, Singapore jailed three Chinese nationals for putting strong glue on their palms to steal casino chips from other gamblers. Substitute “chips” with digital tokens, and “glue” with deceptive computer code, and you could be talking about theft of bonds, equities, mutual funds or any other ownership interest that can have a parallel life on the blockchain.

Turning financial securities into cryptographic representations that can be bought and sold in tiny fractions of what is possible today opens up a new avenue for the masses to accumulate wealth. Using blockchains to democratize finance is an idea that Asia, in particular, has fallen in love with.