I've been writing about money for years. WTFhappenedin1971.com, The I Owe You Note—these pieces are all about the same core insight: you need to understand what you actually own versus what you think you own.

Today I'm going to apply that same framework to something most founders experience directly: the ownership illusion.

You think you own your audience. You built it on Twitter. You think you own your data. You created it inside your SaaS product. You think you own your digital assets. You minted them on OpenSea.

In every case, you're wrong.

Let’s look into your bank account.

When you have a bank account, the bank holds your money. You have a legal claim to it, but the bank is the registered owner. If the bank goes under, your money is FDIC (US banks) insured up to $250,000. But what if it's not? What if you have $2 million in a bank that fails?

You don't own the money. The bank does. You own a claim on the money.

This is why custodial accounts exist. They're the baseline structure for everything financial. Someone else (a custodian) holds the asset. You have a contractual right to it. You hope they don't mess it up.

Now ask yourself: how many assets do you have in custodial relationships?

Your brokerage account? Custodial. Your crypto holdings on Coinbase? Custodial. Your email (owned by Google/Microsoft)? Custodial. Your SaaS data (hosted on AWS/Google Cloud)? Custodial.

In every case, there's a layer between you and your asset. A third party, a platform, a provider. They're your custodian. And they can change the rules.

This one hits different because most founders have experienced it.

You build an audience on Twitter. Thousands of followers, years of content. You think you own that audience.

Elon changes the algorithm. Your reach drops 90%. You check Twitter's ToS. They can deprioritize your account whenever they want. You don't own the relationship with your audience. Twitter does. You lease access to them.

Same thing with TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn. The platform owns the relationship. You're a tenant. They can raise the rent (change the algorithm), evict you (suspend the account), or burn the building down (shut down the platform).

Your data is worse. When you upload data to a SaaS product—customer information, product roadmap, financial records—that data sits on someone else's servers. Yes, you have a contract that says it's yours. But the custodian (the SaaS company) has access to it. They can read it, they can back it up, they can analyze it. And if they go under, or if they get acquired, or if they decide to pivot? Your data is in the middle of all that.

You don't own your data. You have a contractual right to your data, held by someone else.The Digital Asset Trap

Here's where it gets tricky.

You mint an NFT on OpenSea. You think: "I own this NFT."

But where does that NFT live? On the Ethereum blockchain. Who runs the Ethereum blockchain? A distributed network, but if Ethereum changes the rules, your NFT changes. OpenSea is a platform—if they delist your NFT, it's still on the blockchain, but you've lost the marketplace to sell it. The actual image file? It probably lives on IPFS or Arweave or some centralized server. If that server goes down, your NFT becomes a link to a dead image.

You own a token. You don't own the infrastructure, the marketplace, or the underlying asset.

This is the question I've been obsessing over for years.

What do you actually, verifiably, legally own? Something where no third party can revoke access, no intermediary can change the terms, the thing itself is verifiable and transferable, and you can prove ownership without asking for permission.

For most digital assets, the answer is: almost nothing.

This is the ownership gap. And it's getting wider, not narrower, because everything is moving digital.

Here's where the real insight hits.

Tokenization is about taking an asset—could be real estate, could be a company, could be intellectual property—and creating a token representation of it that lives on a blockchain, with all the ownership rights attached to the token.

When you own a token, you own the private key that controls it. No one can revoke your access unless you give them the key. There's no intermediary who can change the rules mid-game. The token is transferable—you can sell it, gift it, or lock it up. And the blockchain provides the proof of ownership.

I started thinking about this in the context of art. Minty.art (my first NFT marketplace) was about tokenizing art so that artists didn't have to rely on galleries or platforms or auction houses. The ownership was on the blockchain. The artist kept the upside. No intermediary could change the terms.

Then I applied it to real estate. Why should you have to use a nominee structure in Bali, or a custodian in the US, or a bank trust for your assets? What if the property was tokenized? What if a fraction of your villa was represented as tokens on a blockchain? You'd own the tokens. No intermediary. No nominee. True ownership.

That's Propex. That's the entire thesis.

The digital economy has been built on access models. You access your email (you don't own it). You access your SaaS product (you don't own the data). You access the internet through an ISP (you don't own the connection).

Ownership is slipping away because the tools we have don't support true ownership. They support custodial relationships.

Blockchain changes that. For the first time, you can have digital ownership without an intermediary. You can hold the asset directly. You can prove ownership without asking for permission.

But here's the thing: it's not automatic. Just because something is on a blockchain doesn't mean it's truly owned. You need the legal structure (the LLC, the SPV, the proper documentation) to match the blockchain representation. You need the real-world property to actually be tokenized legally.

That's the hard part. Not the token. Not the blockchain. The legal certainty that the token represents real ownership of real assets.

Stop assuming you own things just because you created them or paid for them.

Your email? You don't own it. Back it up.

Your audience on social media? You don't own it. Build an email list where the relationship is direct and portable.

Your SaaS data? You don't own it. Make sure you can export it, and regularly do.

Your digital assets? You don't own them unless they're tokenized with proper legal structure.

The founders who are going to win in the next decade are the ones who understand the difference between custodial relationships and true ownership. They're the ones building around verifiable, transferable, legally certain ownership structures.

Tokenization is the tool. But you have to understand the problem first.

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Interested in tokenization? Propex.app is building the infrastructure and legal frameworks to tokenize real assets. If you're thinking about property ownership, fractional investment, or blockchain-backed assets, it's worth exploring.