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I've been thinking about fax machines.🤓
No, not because I'm going insane, but because they've been around for almost 200 years.
Technology doesn't seem to die - it evolves and amalgamates after hitting critical adoption milestones. 👇
What The Fax 📠
The fax machine was invented in 1843. That's right, fax machines are OLDER than the state of California.
Commercial systems existed by 1863, but actual mass adoption didn't happen until the 1900s, when telephone networks made it practical.
That's around 100 years from invention to widespread use, and it required a parallel technology (telephones) to really make things work.
And that meandering path towards adoption with overlapping use cases tells us a lot about the future of technology today.
"𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐝" 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐖𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐃𝐢𝐞 💀
Let's talk about COBOL, the now-ancient programming language from 1959 that still runs most of the world's financial infrastructure.
Banks process trillions of dollars daily through mainframe terminals that look like museum pieces - if you've ever played the Fallout series, you have a good basis for imagining mainframe.
Why use 60+ year old technology?
Legacy systems technically work, migration is expensive, and the risk of catastrophic failure makes change terrifying or just not worth it.
Tokenization won't replace this infrastructure quickly.
Instead, we'll see decades of tokenized assets settling on traditional rails, APIs wrapping ancient systems in modern interfaces, and hybrid solutions that look onchain but depend on offchain infrastructure.
Heck, that's why @chainlink oracles exist - for bridging worlds that refuse to integrate fully to the new onchain reality.
A Game of 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐩𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐠 🐸
The best part about this is that not everyone follows the same path.
Some entities will run on fully tokenized rails, while laggards will still be calling their increasingly hard-to-come-by human brokers in the year 2050 to execute a trade.
It's the same reason you occasionally see an elderly woman writing a physical check in the grocery store - it works, it's familiar, and it won't be here after that generation has left us.
Tokenization is here to stay, but that doesn't mean COBOL won't reach its 100th birthday in production.
The Cost Driven Takeaway 🧮
The fax machine took over 100 years, and murmurs of COBOL "dying" have been circulating for 40+ years.
But the point at which a technology truly "dies" is when maintenance costs exceed switching costs.
Tokenization isn't a single event. It's a decades-long migration with varying adoption curves across assets and regions.
The question isn't "when will tokenization win?" It's "which assets, in which markets, on what timeline?"
Or another fun one: "What do you think gets tokenized last?" 👀
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