The NYSE’s big tokenization plan is vaporware dressed up as innovation

In 1998, the world’s largest telecom, AT&T, cut a series of deals with a popular startup called Excite. By distributing Excite’s content and search tools over its giant cable network, the company believed it could extend its dominance into the emerging Internet era. Google, of course, had other plans and today its market cap is 20 times larger than AT&T.

I thought about AT&T as I read the New York Stock Exchange’s announcement of a new platform for tokenized securities. The...