Provenance-Backed Securities: A Framework for Tokenizing Intangible Assets and Redistributing Ownership in the Age of Automation

Abstract

Joseph Richard Harmon*

Intangible assets now constitute approximately 92% of S&P 500 market capitalization and nearly $80 trillion in global corporate value, yet the vast majority of intangible intellectual property—including genetic innovations, creative works, personal data, and accumulated human expertise—lacks any liquid secondary market, standardized valuation mechanism, or tradeable financial instrument [1,2]. The existing literature on real-world asset tokenization, projected to reach $18.9 trillion by 2033, focuses overwhelmingly on financial instruments, bonds, and real estate, leaving a conspicuous theoretical gap: no comprehensive framework addresses the tokenization of performance-verified intangible assets with provenance-backed ownership claims [3]. This paper proposes a three-layer architectural framework—the Provenance Ledger, the Performance Oracle, and the Exchange Protocol—for creating a new class of digital securities whose value derives from verified provenance and empirically measured real-world performance data. The framework is demonstrated through an agricultural proof of concept (SeedBid, a patent-pending genetic asset exchange) and extended to seven additional market domains, including labor and human capital, creative works, patents, personal data, manufacturing processes, and scientific research. When applied to labor markets facing AI-driven displacement— with 92 million jobs projected for redundancy by 2030— provenance-backed securities offer a structural mechanism for converting accumulated human expertise into owned, tradeable, royalty-generating assets, thereby addressing the fundamental ownership gap that universal basic income, reskilling programs, and existing policy proposals fail to resolve [4]. This paper argues that provenance-backed securities represent a market-based pathway toward economic meritocracy by ensuring that the creators of intangible value retain ownership of the assets they produce.

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