Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya believes that decentralized finance (DeFi) will eventually allow people across the world to monetize and financialize all of their assets, allowing them to be stored on the blockchain.
Palihapitiya, who is a former vice president at Facebook, is currently best known for running his California-based venture capital firm Social Capital.
“All the leakage you have today goes away in a world of DeFi because you will financialize every single asset possible. You know you’ll financialize your homes. You’ll financialize your cars. You’ll financialize your watches, your jewelry, and your art. You’ll financialize every random thing,” he told the Savvy Finance podcast.
“By monetizing it and financializing it, you can borrow against it, you can trade it, you can pull forward value into the future against it. But it will all be tracked,” according to Social Capital’s CEO.
Palihapitiya agreed with the host that people would even be enabled to monetize and financialize their careers with the use of the technology.
At the same time, the investor said that, in the long-term, the government would require an “off-ramp to taxation” of such assets, as, for instance, “a physical house exists in the world. You can’t hide the existence of a physical house.”
“Some assets will live anonymously. And those are the assets that don’t need to exist in the real world. But I think what this will create is a world where all of these assets that actually really exist in the world — it will be fine that it exists and that people get taxed on it, but it will be much more legitimate and simpler,” Palihapitiya said. “I think people will trade off incremental taxation for incremental monetizability.”
