Michael Anderson of Framework Ventures put it crisply this week: blockchain's next chapter isn't crypto. It's becoming the financing layer for capital-intensive industries — AI and robotics in particular.

The economics make sense. A single H100 GPU runs tens of thousands of dollars. A serious compute cluster starts in the hundreds of millions. Humanoid robotics at scale is even heavier. Traditional VC tickets don't reach that scale, banks won't touch it without collateral, and the IPO clock is too slow for hardware that depreciates this fast.

Tokenized real-world assets — fractionalized GPU capacity, robotics output rights, data center revenue streams — are how this gap gets filled. Hong Kong's SFC has been actively bringing tokenized funds and tokenized bonds into its existing securities framework. Singapore's MAS already classifies these instruments. Dubai and BVI complete the menu.

For Mainland Chinese founders, this is where it gets interesting. Domestic entities still cannot issue or hold crypto under current policy. The path runs through offshore structures, offshore issuance, offshore settlement — and a carefully designed cross-border channel back to the operating business: ODI filings, FX routes, tax structure, IP placement.

Layer on top of that the AI-specific compliance: whose training data, model weights as "important data," cross-border data export assessments. Issuance is the easy part. The hard part is making sure each compute transaction downstream doesn't trigger a separate compliance event.

I've been watching on-chain infrastructure since 2011, with a CS background. What's different this cycle is that the chain is finally serving real industry — not the other way around.

If you're a hardware or AI founder thinking about tokenized financing for the next stage, the structure decision happens before the term sheet, not after.

#CrossBorderLaw #BlockchainCompliance #AIRegulation #TokenizedAssets #RWA

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Mike Wu, China-licensed Attorney · Cross-border practice
4 languages (CN/EN/ES/JA)
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