At TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Balaji Srinivasan, founder of Network School and a former chief technology officer of Coinbase, described how online communities can generate demand before capital is committed to physical infrastructure. Shayne Coplan, founder and chief executive officer of Polymarket, explained how blockchain-based prediction markets create prices for events and risks that previously lacked observable market values.

Their approaches apply crypto infrastructure to different economic functions. Srinivasan uses online networks to organise communities, coordinate investment and support physical development. Coplan uses blockchain infrastructure to establish markets and generate price information that can inform larger financial transactions. Both extend crypto beyond digital asset trading into the organisation of economic activity.

From an online network to a physical community

Srinivasan's central argument is that crypto can organise communities as well as facilitate the exchange of currencies and tokens. "Not just cryptocurrencies, but crypto communities," he said. "The ultimate real-world asset is a community, a city, even a country." Network School, established in 2024, is his attempt to apply that idea in practice. According to Srinivasan, the initiative attracted thousands of participants from more than 80 countries, initially operating in Malaysia before relocating to Kazakhstan.

Its development model reverses the conventional sequence of property investment. Rather than acquiring land and constructing facilities before attracting occupants, the organiser first establishes an online community, tests demand through temporary physical gatherings and then commits capital to permanent premises. Srinivasan summarised the approach as "cloud first, land last, but not land never". Rather than acquiring property first and then looking for occupants, the organiser builds a community and waiting list before committing more capital to physical infrastructure. Srinivasan compared this sequence with Tesla's use of advance demand to support production expansion. "Capital online, build offline, use the cloud and land together," he said.

Srinivasan also identified underused real estate as an opportunity. "The network state is actually about distressed real estate," he said, pointing to vacant homes, towns and campuses that could be occupied and refurbished. Instead of financing new developments from the ground up, organisers can bring established communities into existing properties. The economic proposition combines demand aggregation with the reuse of underutilised assets.

Membership, services and financing can sit on the same network

Network School combines this physical model with what Srinivasan calls "society as a service". Accommodation, food, events and other services can be provided through a subscription. He compared this with providing "the Google campus as a subscription". Tokens could also link membership in the online network with access to the physical community. Srinivasan described members holding "some identity, some NFT or some coin" that could be used to enter an online group and, in principle, a physical location. In this model, digital identity, online membership and physical access are administered through the same network.

Srinivasan extended this concept to financing. He proposed issuing crypto-based equity to bring expected future value into the present and finance community development. "We issue crypto equity and then we use that to materialise the future into the present," he said. The proposal connects community formation with capital raising. An established online network provides a pool of potential participants and supporters before major investment takes place. However, membership rights and ownership claims perform different economic functions. A token that grants access to services does not automatically represent equity or an entitlement to financial returns. Any financing structure must establish the rights and claims attached to the instrument.

The distinction matters because the financing model depends not simply on issuing a token but on what that token represents and how the underlying community generates economic value.

Mobility changes the relationship between communities and locations

Srinivasan also presented mobility as a feature of network-based communities. He said Network School received offers from ten countries before relocating to Kazakhstan, where it secured more favourable terms and government support. "If you don't give us the terms we want, we'll sign with somebody else, which we did," he said.

The relocation illustrates a distinction between the community and the physical assets it occupies. An online network can preserve its membership and organisation while changing its geographical base. Srinivasan described this as becoming "as liquid in the physical world as we are in the digital world, albeit with some friction". The community remains an organised network even as its physical location changes. For host jurisdictions and property owners, this introduces a different relationship with mobile groups whose demand for facilities, services and accommodation can be coordinated across borders.

Polymarket extends crypto into market creation

Coplan's approach begins with the creation of markets rather than communities. Polymarket allows users to trade contracts linked to future events and derive an implied probability from the resulting market price. "You can trade markets on events for anything and see the odds in terms of how likely things are to happen," he said.

Coplan explained that blockchain infrastructure enabled experimentation with contracts that traditional derivatives exchanges would have found commercially unattractive. Small or specialised event markets can generate limited trading revenue, making the cost of listing and operating them difficult to justify under conventional exchange models. "No traditional derivatives exchange would have thought the juice was worth the squeeze," Coplan said.

Blockchain infrastructure allowed Polymarket to introduce event-based contracts and test market demand without relying on the same initial operating structure as established derivatives exchanges. For Coplan, one of the original attractions was "seeing the price of things and being able to use it as an information source". This moves the function of a prediction market beyond trading. Market prices aggregate participants' expectations into observable probabilities, creating information about outcomes that may not otherwise have a continuously quoted price.

Price discovery depends on liquidity

Creating a market is only the first step. Its effectiveness depends on participation, liquidity and contract design. Coplan emphasised the importance of attracting retail demand. "The less retail demand you have, the higher the cost of getting liquidity is for these markets," he said. As the number of contracts expands, the platform must support liquidity across a larger range of outcomes. Without sufficient buyers and sellers, markets become more expensive to maintain and prices less informative. He also emphasised the need for markets to be well defined and unambiguous and for the platform to have an efficient way of supporting liquidity. Contracts must specify outcomes that can be resolved unambiguously. Unclear settlement conditions weaken confidence in the resulting prices, regardless of the technology used to operate the market.

These requirements connect prediction markets to established principles of financial-market infrastructure. Meaningful price discovery depends on trading participation, contract clarity and the ability to transact at observable prices.

A new price can become a reference point

Coplan identified a further application for prediction-market prices in institutional financial markets. A question or risk may initially have no observable market price. Once trading establishes one, that price can provide a reference for transactions beyond the original contract. "Even if it's very low liquidity, that becomes a reference point for larger transactions to take place," he said.

He identified over-the-counter transactions, swaps and block trades as potential applications. The significance lies in separating the market that discovers a price from the transaction that subsequently uses it. A relatively small event market can generate an initial valuation for a specific risk. Larger counterparties can then use that information when negotiating or structuring bilateral transactions.

Such prices provide additional information rather than automatically establishing executable institutional valuations. Liquidity, contract specifications and the reliability of the underlying market remain important when applying them to larger transactions.

Coplan also described Polymarket's relationship with Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and the New York Stock Exchange, identifying ICE as one of its major shareholders. The connection illustrates how prediction-market information is entering the institutional financial-market ecosystem. Banks, investors and market intermediaries can use event-based probabilities as another source of information without necessarily trading the underlying contracts.

Crypto infrastructure can support different economic functions

The discussion also addressed how blockchain infrastructure could change the representation and transfer of ownership. Coplan described the possibility of an on-chain asset representing an economic interest in a company while incorporating additional programmatic functions. Such an instrument could combine ownership with capabilities built into its digital structure, including mechanisms affecting transfer or use.

Coplan said Polymarket was exploring this approach, although its eventual structure had not been determined. "It's all a function of the underlying business and asset," he said. His observation draws an important distinction between the technology used to represent ownership and the economic rights being represented.

Blockchain infrastructure can change how an ownership interest is recorded, transferred or integrated with other applications. The value of that interest continues to depend on the performance of the underlying business or asset.

Srinivasan and Coplan therefore approach capital formation from different directions. Srinivasan focuses on aggregating communities and using future economic expectations to support physical development. Coplan considers how established ownership interests could be represented and made transferable through on-chain infrastructure. Both connect digital networks with existing economic relationships rather than treating token issuance as a source of value in itself.

From crypto assets to economic infrastructure

Srinivasan and Coplan demonstrate how crypto infrastructure is extending beyond digital assets into demand aggregation, capital formation and price discovery.

Network-based communities offer banks new ways to assess demand before financing physical development, while prediction markets create reference prices that can inform risk assessments and larger financial transactions. On-chain ownership also opens possibilities for issuing, transferring and managing economic interests through digital infrastructure.

These applications retain the fundamental requirements of finance: viable assets, enforceable ownership rights, sufficient liquidity and reliable pricing. Blockchain changes how economic activity is organised and transacted, not the underlying sources of value.

The significance lies in crypto's emerging role as economic infrastructure. Financial institutions can use these mechanisms to identify investment opportunities, develop new financial products and improve how capital and risk are managed across markets.