Crypto: Coinbase Says Capital Access Beats Income In Wealth Creation

The policy paper argues that access to capital markets, rather than income or banking, now defines who can build wealth and says tokenization could widen participation.

A new Coinbase Institute report argues that the most important divide in global finance is no longer rich versus poor, but between those who have direct access to capital markets and those who do not, which it describes as the “brokered” versus the “unbrokered.”

The report estimates that traditional intermediated rails exclude roughly four billion unbrokered individuals from owning productive assets or raising capital at scale. Closing this gap, it argues, will require rebuilding core market infrastructure so smaller investors and issuers can participate directly rather than through layers of intermediaries.

According to the report, over the last 40 years in the United States alone, capital income grew 136% while labor income lagged at just 57%.

The paper’s central claim is that access to capital markets, not just basic banking, has become the real gatekeeper of wealth creation.

Traditional systems rely on layers of brokers, custodians and clearing houses, making it uneconomical to serve smaller investors or issuers and leaving a “capital chasm” between the brokered minority and everyone else.

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Meanwhile, ownership of stocks, bonds and funds clusters heavily in advanced economies, among already brokered households.

Coinbase’s argument is not just that tokenization matters, but that permissionless tokenization is essential if the unbrokered are to benefit.

The report claims that permissioned consortia and closed enterprise blockchain models tend to replicate existing power dynamics, with a few gatekeepers deciding who can issue, list or access tokenized assets.

Source: CoinTelegraph