Jade City

Designing the on-chain economy that made physical jade — a real-world asset underpinning a $50bn industry in China — into a tokenised, investable instrument.

Jade is a real-world asset most investors will never touch, despite underpinning a $50bn industry in China. Working across the Jade City economy and its commercial anchor, Jade Vault, I designed the system that made physical jade investable — concept through to a $2M raise. The transferable work isn't the commodity; it's the method: taking an illiquid, capital-illegible asset class and designing it into a tokenised instrument that capital can underwrite.

The opportunity: a $50bn asset class with no on-ramp

Jade sits at the centre of a $50bn industry in China, yet as an asset class it remains structurally illiquid and illegible to conventional capital. The physical supply chain — extraction, processing, grading, sale — is opaque to outside investors, and neither commodity finance nor venture is structured to underwrite it. The opportunity was to make that asset class accessible: to give global investors a genuine position in physical jade without ever handling the stone.

The approach: a supply chain, modelled on-chain

Jade City modelled the real jade supply chain as a coherent on-chain economy. Rather than abstract the commodity into a token, the design mirrored the physical value chain one-to-one — extraction through to finished product — so the tokenised representation stayed legible from source to market. Tokenisation opened the underlying real-world asset to investors anywhere, and the surrounding world — rendered in part with Midjourney at its release — gave the instrument a narrative and brand a whitepaper alone could not carry.

The substance underneath: Jade Vault

The proposition was never a token in isolation. Beneath the economy sat Jade Vault — the offtaker handling the real commercial flow of physical jade: sourcing, processing and sale of the underlying asset. Jade Vault was the substance that made the instrument credible, and I worked across both layers — the Jade City economy above and the Jade Vault commercial operation beneath — so the tokenised position stayed anchored to genuine real-world activity rather than narrative alone.

The instrument: a bond protocol with physical-jade yield

At the core was a bond protocol and lending platform collateralised by physical jade, offering an asset-backed yield to attract liquidity. The structure had to balance several forces at once:

• the real-world value of the underlying jade,
• the collateral securing each position,
• a buy-back policy to support the token,
• a measured release mechanism to prevent price spikes,
• the genuine lead time to ship, process and sell the physical asset, and
• a yield calibrated to remain sustainable rather than reflexive.

Built on Base, with its on-chain logic expressed in Rainlang and a real-world-asset management backend handling issuance and the collateral mechanism.

The gamification layer: pricing the unknowable

Jade is non-fungible by nature, and its value is revealed only at the cut — the same uncertainty that drives the live jade-cutting markets, where a single stone can move from ordinary to extraordinary in an instant. Rather than engineer that randomness away, the design used it: a gamification layer emulated the random quality reveal of physical jade, turning the asset's intrinsic non-fungibility into a native product mechanic.

The ecosystem: two audiences, one system

I co-designed the protocol and a hybrid token ecosystem alongside David Atkinson of Holochain, on the platform issuing the tokenised physical jade. The system had to serve two audiences simultaneously: investors seeking yield, and a supply chain that had to remain legible from source to market. Ownership of the underlying economy was represented on-chain, with value accruing to holders through a buy-and-burn as commercial activity grew — a passive position alongside the active lending and reveal mechanics.

The result

Built zero-to-one — concept, economic architecture and creative direction through to a $2M raise. The instrument gave global investors a tokenised position in a real-world asset that had previously been inaccessible, anchored to genuine commercial substance through Jade Vault. The business continues to develop, its component parts maturing across both the on-chain economy and the physical operation.

Role: Economic, Product & Protocol Design, and creative direction — concept through raise. Co-designed with David Atkinson, Holochain.