Several articles examined in this post to gauge the potential to tokenize Rare Earth Elements (REEs), framing it as a key battleground in the “spreadsheet capitalism” framework and the BRICS bloc’s challenge to the US dollar. The post analyzes the promise of financial tokenization, the BRICS strategy, and the significant practical barriers that make REEs poor candidates for effective financialization compared to assets like gold.

The post first outlines the theoretical benefits of tokenizing REEs: making a strategically vital but illiquid asset class accessible to global investors, improving transparency through blockchain, and channeling capital towards sustainable mining. It then analyzes the BRICS strategy, suggesting the bloc aims to leverage its control over REE reserves to create a new, commodity-backed financial system. This system would use tokenized REEs as a semiotic and computational anchor, creating an alternative to the USD-based grid by using its own payment channels (like China’s CIPS) and exchanges.

However, the posts’s core argument is that this vision will likely struggle due to fundamental aspects of REEs. Unlike standardized gold, rare earths are not “fungible;” a token for “neodymium” is meaningless without specifying its exact purity and form. Furthermore, the REE market is opaque, lacking the transparent, global price benchmarks needed for the computational formulas that drive modern finance.

The post concludes that while specific batches of REEs might be tokenized for niche industrial purposes, their physical and geopolitical complexity prevents them from being effectively abstracted into the simple, liquid symbols required to function as a major global asset. REEs remain stubbornly tied to the real world, resisting the clean logic of spreadsheet capitalism.

The post takes a critical look at tokenizing rare earth elements that promise to bring liquidity to a strategically vital but currently inaccessible asset class. A major problem is that REEs are physically and industrially bound to specific geographies (notably China, Brazil, and Africa) and often priced through opaque or bilateral contracts. Their physicality resists the liquidity and standardization demanded by global capital markets.

Historically, REEs have been coordinated and transacted by governments, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), large corporations, and very specialized traders. Tokenization hopes to break this barrier and give alternate investors exposure to these assets. For a manufacturer here in Korea, like Samsung or Hyundai, a token representing “neodymium” could be a powerful tool for hedging against price volatility. For investors, it could offer a new way to speculate on the green energy transition.

For BRICS, tokenization may provide non-dollar financing and avoids Western sanctions. REE tokens embody “material sovereignty” that represent tangible backing for new currencies. But what are the rare earths and what are limitations for its financialization?

What are Rare Earths?

Rare Earths are a set of seventeen metallic elements integral to a wide range of modern mechanisms, from consumer electronics to advanced military hardware. Although called “rare,” they are relatively abundant but difficult to find in economically viable concentrations for mining.

Rare Earth Elements (RREs) are roughly divided between two categories based on their position in chemistry’s periodic table. The heavy rare earth elements (HREEs) are a subgroup of the rare earth family characterized by their higher atomic numbers and greater atomic weights. Known as the “Heavies,” Dysprosium (Dy), Terbium (Tb), and Yttrium (Y) are critical for modern defense applications and the green energy revolution.

The Heavier Rare Earths Dysprosium (Dy) and Terbium (Tb) serve several purposes. They are vital additives to neodymium magnets, as they enable them to retain their powerful magnetic properties at the extremely high temperatures found inside an electric vehicle motor or a wind turbine generator. Yttrium (Y) is used as a red phosphor in older CRT displays and some modern LEDs. It’s also a critical component in certain high-performance lasers and medical devices.

Other heavy metals include Gadolinium (Gd), which has unique magnetic properties that make it critical as a contrast agent in MRI scans, helping to produce clearer images of internal organs and tissues. Erbium (Er) is a key element in modern telecommunications. It is used to create optical amplifiers for fiber-optic cables, boosting the data signal as it travels over long distances without requiring conversion back into electricity.

The “Lights” are the more common rare earths, often used in magnets, catalysts, and glass. Neodymium (Nd) is the most important rare earth element, critical for creating the world’s strongest permanent magnets (NdFeB magnets). These are used in everything from the tiny motors that make your smartphone vibrate to the giant electric motors in EVs (like a Tesla Model 3) and the generators in wind turbines.

Other “Lights” include Praseodymium (Pr), which enhances high-power magnets by improving their heat resistance when combined with neodymium, while also creating a yellow hue in glass and ceramics. Lanthanum (La) enhances optical clarity in camera lenses and telescopes. It is also a crucial component in nickel-metal hydride batteries used in hybrid vehicles, such as the Toyota Prius. Cerium (Ce) serves major industrial roles, acting as a primary catalyst in automotive catalytic converters to reduce emissions and as a polishing agent for manufacturing glass screens and lenses.

The Promise of Tokenizing Rare Earth Elements

Returning to Ms. Mason, as a blockchain consultant, she argues that tokenizing rare earth minerals promises to transform them from a hidden, industrial ingredient into a dynamic and accessible financial asset. The narrative behind this push is one of modernization and democratization, built on five key benefits.

The first benefit is a promise is to shatter the barriers of an exclusive market. Historically, investing in rare earths was a privilege reserved for governments, large corporations, and specialized investors. Tokenization aims to change this by offering everyday investors a chance to gain exposure to this critical asset class, making it globally accessible. This newfound accessibility is paired with a solution to the age-old problem of liquidity. Instead of the slow, cumbersome process of trading physical commodities, tokens enable a swift, 24/7 global market, allowing investors to move in and out of positions with ease.

Furthermore, this new market is to be built on a technological foundation of trust. By utilizing blockchain technology, every transaction is recorded on a transparent and immutable ledger. This move promises to drastically reduce the risk of fraud and create a more trustworthy supply chain. This newfound visibility makes rare earth tokens an attractive tool for portfolio diversification, offering an alternative asset that can perform differently from traditional stocks and other financial instruments during times of market volatility.

Perhaps most compellingly, the tokenization of rare earths is framed as a way to align profit with planetary goals. As demand for these minerals soars, driven by the green energy transition and the rise of electric vehicles, tokenization provides a direct channel for global capital to fund sustainable mining operations and renewable energy projects. This new ability allows investors to directly support and benefit from a more sustainable economy.

The BRICS Challenge

Cyrus Janssen’s argument that the BRICS plan to replace the US dollar with REE tokens is based on the recent 2025 Moscow Financial Forum held in mid-September. They announced plans for a dedicated precious metals exchange that would allow countries to settle payments in gold, diamonds, platinum, and also rare earth minerals. It would bypass Western systems like the London Metal Exchange (LME) that currently establishes most prices for critical commodities. After the Ukraine war started, this system excluded Russia, despite recently becoming the fifth largest gold holder worldwide.

The YouTube video argues that this new infrastructure is underpinned by the bloc’s dominance over strategic global resources. Janssen stresses that Brazil currently produces nearly all of the world’s niobium supply. BRIC countries also have significant amounts of gold. This level of resource control, he argues, is the foundation for a new system that moves away from the US’s fiat currency toward a REE-backed monetary standard.

The Watcher.guru article is more informative. It backs the claim that a viable tokenization market for rare earth elements (REEs) is planned as part of a BRICS+ strategy to create a commodity-backed, blockchain-based exchange system. Proponents of the political bloc cheer on its efforts to replace the US dollar in international trade by leveraging control over critical resources — gold, rare earths, energy, and food — to build a new pricing and settlement architecture.

The proposed mechanism would merge resource monetization (turning metals into tradable digital assets) with BRICS’ payment innovations, such as CIPS instead of SWIFT’s blockchain infrastructure, and gold-based exchange rates. The aim is to anchor a BRICS currency system in tokenized REE commodities rather than fiat trust.

This strategy is reportedly gaining attention amid a steep decline in US dollar usage, which the article notes has fallen to its lowest share of global reserves since 2000 (58%), with 68% of global trade now conducted without the dollar. The framework is said to be particularly appealing to emerging economies, especially in Africa, which see the new exchange as a way to leverage their own resource projects and escape the political influence tied to the Western financial system.

The article concludes that by combining direct control over critical commodities with an independent payment and exchange infrastructure, the BRICS bloc is creating a direct and increasingly plausible challenge aimed at systematically replacing the US dollar’s global hegemony with a new, resource-backed financial order.

However, will rare earth metals effectively tokenize on the SCT Stack of spreadsheet capitalism? The practical realities of the REE market clash with the clean abstractions required by the SCT stack. Will blockchains prove sufficient in creating a new infrastructure for REE tokenization that can back a new currency?

Major Barriers to Effective Tokenization in the SCT Stack

Rare earth metals will not tokenize as effectively as other assets like gold within the spreadsheet capitalism framework. The main reasons are their fundamental lack of fungibility and market transparency. Fungibility is the property of goods or assets where individual units are interchangeable and indistinguishable. Unlike gold, where one bar is a near-perfect substitute for another, each batch of rare earths is a unique industrial ingredient. This physical complexity resists the radical simplification needed to create a clean, tradable digital symbol. These weaknesses creates a flawed semiotic substitution, making them difficult to represent as simple, standardized symbols that the system requires.

The first step of the stack, turning a real-world asset into a digital symbol, fails at a basic level for REEs. Gold is highly standardized. A token like PAXG can represent a claim on one fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery gold bar, a globally accepted standard. Rare earths are not standardized. A token for “one kilogram of neodymium” is a meaningless symbol without specifying its purity (e.g., 99.5% vs. 99.99%), its form (oxide, metal, or alloy), and its origin.

Spreadsheet capitalism thrives on a single, globally synchronized price that can be fed into computational formulas. The gold market has the XAUUSD, a real-time price stream from the COMEX and LBMA. The rare earths market has no such indicators. Prices are opaque and determined by private, bilateral contracts between a few major suppliers (primarily in China) and industrial buyers.

There is no reliable, liquid, global benchmark price for a REE token to peg itself to. This makes it incredibly difficult to use the token in the computational stack for risk modeling, derivatives pricing, or collateral valuation. A token is only as good as the asset backing it. The gold market has a mature, trusted, and highly audited network of vaults (e.g., in London, New York, and Zurich). The infrastructure for storing and verifying large quantities of REEs for the benefit of token holders simply does not exist on a similar scale. Establishing this trusted custodial layer would be a massive undertaking, especially given the geopolitical concentration of the supply chain.

Tokenization and Blockchain in the SCT Stack

The tokenization of REEs’ arguments sits at the intersection of the spreadsheet capitalism framework and the possibilities of the emerging tokenization of resource value. Below is a detailed analysis of the articles’ claim for a viable tokenization market for rare earth elements, framed through the three logics of Substitution/Abstraction, Symbolic Computing, and Telecom Grid Synchronization — and their geopolitical-economic implications for de-dollarization.

This analysis challenges the claims that a viable tokenization market for rare earth elements (REEs) will successfully emerge as part of a BRICS+ strategy to create a commodity-backed, blockchain-based exchange system in the near term. The plan to replace the US dollar in international trade by leveraging control over critical resources such as gold, rare earths, energy, and food to establish a new pricing and settlement architecture will face numerous challenges.

The proposed mechanism to merge resource monetization (turning metals into tradable digital assets) with payment innovation, such as China’s CIPS instead of SWIFT, aims to anchor a BRICS currency system in tokenized commodities rather than fiat trust. Tokenization represents a shift from fiat-denominated computational pricing to resource-denominated signification.

In the current dollar-based system, metals are priced in USD units, substituting their material value through the symbolic power of the dollar grid (Bloomberg, LSEG, Aladdin). The proposed BRICS system seeks to invert this substitution with digital tokens that would directly represent fractions of physical metals or reserves (e.g., 1 REE token = 1 kg neodymium stored in Angola). This would convert matter into sign, but without passing through the dollar — a new layer of semiotic substitution detached from US spreadsheet infrastructures.

Hence, REE tokenization is not just about digitization — it’s a semiotic rebellion, replacing the dollar as the global unit of account with resource-tied symbols recorded on BRICS-led blockchain exchanges. The viability of this market depends on whether tokenized REEs can be abstracted into comparable, liquid financial instruments:

Blockchain tokens offer fungibility and fractionalization, allowing them to represent micro-ownership in rare earth deposits, making these assets tradable on digital exchanges. This transition allows integration into risk models and cross-asset portfolios, similar to how ETFs abstract physical gold into digital gold.

However, liquidity, verification, and pricing transparency remain key obstacles. Substitution and abstraction requires standardization across jurisdictions, audits, and trading rules — the very functions that spreadsheet platforms (Bloomberg, LSEG) currently monopolize.

Thus, the challenge for BRICS+ is to build alternative abstraction infrastructures, such as transparent ledgers and decentralized oracles, which substitute for Western data terminals.

Symbolic computing is the performative layer of finance that involves modeling, pricing, and hedging. It is where tokenized REEs would gain traction or fail. Once tokenized, REE assets can enter computational environments like risk models, smart contracts, and DeFi-style derivative markets. These environments could compute prices via algorithmic market-making, automated yield, or resource-backed lending using smart contracts.

Symbolic computation combines with substitution to transform natural resources into programmable collateral. It integrates geopolitics into code. In spreadsheet capitalism terms, the REE token becomes a computable symbol, allowing new forms of liquidity and leverage. The question is, will it be within the alternative BRICS grid, and not the USD-based symbolic regime?

The current USD regime faces challenges from the emerging BRICS+ token regime. The pricing infrastructure at the London Bullion Market, COMEX, and displayed on USD-denominated tickers become challenged by the Shanghai Gold Exchange and the BRICS Precious Metals Exchange. At the computational layer terminals like Bloomberg, LSEG, Aladdin (USD risk models) could be replaced by BRICS exchange APIs and smart contract oracles. Telecom synchronization provided by SWIFT, Fedwire, CLS, and T2 is challenged by China’s CIPS and new blockchain settlement layers. The unit of account for USD regimes would be challenged by REE resources- or gold-backed tokens.

In sum, the semiotic anchor of “dollar liquidity” is challenged by “resource transparency.” This transition amounts to a shift in the semiotic-computational-telecom stack — from dollar-based spreadsheets to distributed ledgers as the new computation and synchronization substrate.

Strategic Implications of REE Tokenization

The article implies that REEs could become prime candidates for early tokenization, for several reasons. One is resource concentration. BRICS+ control some 72% of reserves — enabling monopoly-like coordination. Strategic REEs demand for EVs, semiconductors, and defense industries ensures long-term value. The political incentive is that tokenization provides non-dollar financing and avoids Western sanctions. The symbolic appeal is that REE tokens embody “material sovereignty” — representing tangible backing for possible new currencies from domestic sources.

However, for tokenization to function at scale, pricing transparency, custodial assurance, and convertibility mechanisms must rival the computing and synchronization of Western spreadsheet terminals. Otherwise, the REE token risks being symbolic without liquidity — an “unsettled” sign in the global financial grammar.

Integration into Spreadsheet Capitalism

If realized, REE token markets would appear within Aladdin, Bloomberg, and Wind terminals as synthetic tickers such as:

Nd_TKN, Co_TKN, Nb_TKN — linked to blockchain APIs.

In real-time feeds it will pull via =BDP(“REE_TKN”,”LAST_PRICE”).

In cross-hedge models, REE tokens correlate with gold, oil, and Treasury yields and in risk modules tokenized REEs enter global portfolios for diversification. Lastly, yield analytics integrate them into DeFi-linked or BRICS exchange-backed smart contracts. Thus, even as tokenization claims autonomy from the USD, its representation and computation would still occur through the spreadsheet logic — the universal language of substitution and abstraction.

Synthesis and Conclusion

This post ultimately envisions a tokenized commodity standard where semiotic substitution (token), symbolic computation (smart contract), and telecom synchronization (blockchain ledger) merge and add a new spreadsheet layer, with and beyond the US dollar.

In this system, rare earth tokens become both symbols and settlement instruments. Blockchain ledgers enter the grids of computation and coordination while AI-driven analytics and terminals (like Wind or Aladdin) price, hedge, and optimize across these new semiotic surfaces.

Tokenization will provide a niche tool for the near future, not a global asset. While specific, standardized batches of rare earths could be tokenized for supply chain tracking or to collateralize a specific loan between industrial partners, they are unlikely to become a liquid, globally traded asset class like tokenized gold. The very physical and geopolitical complexities that make rare earths strategically critical are what prevent them from being effectively abstracted into the fungible, placeless symbols of spreadsheet capitalism. They remain stubbornly tied to the physical world.

The operational grammar of symbolic computing is how spreadsheet capitalism expresses financial meaning as formulas and returns. When this is applied to tokenized assets — i.e., digital representations of securities, commodities, or currencies living on blockchain or managed through APIs — the symbolic layer translates blockchain state into spreadsheet logic.

But the paradox remains. While tokenization decentralizes value representation, symbolic computation re-centralizes it in global grids. Whoever controls the grid of valuation models will control the next monetary order. USD’s centrality equals control over pricing, modeling, and messaging. BRICS’ challenge is to create a parallel semiotic and computational infrastructure built on tokenization that global finance can compute with. Whoever defines the physical custodial layer (i.e. Chinese gold vaults in Saudi Arabia) and the symbolic grammar of tokenized commodities will be in a good place to define the new world order.

Notes

[1] This was written a few days before China announced new licensing restrictions on REEs that caused a significant drop in financial indexes and understandable furor in the White House.

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2025, Oct 8) Will BRICS Effectively Tokenize Rare Earth Elements to Back a New Currency? apennings.com https://apennings.com/dystopian-economies/will-brics-effectively-tokenize-rare-earth-elements-to-back-a-new-currency/

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Not to be considered financial advice. LLMS were used in parts of this post.

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea and a Research Professor for Stony Brook University. He teaches AI policy and broadband economics. From 2002-2012 he taught digital economics and information systems management at New York University. He also taught in the Digital Media MBA at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in Korea.

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Category: blockchain, data analytics and meaning, digital geography, digital media economics, digital spreadsheets, dystopian economies, electric money, enabling frameworks, financial news, geopolitical risk, global communications, meaning makers, science and technology studies, smart new deal, sustainable development, technologies of meaning, telecom policy and net neutrality, telegraphic political economy
Tags: BRICS > fungibility > Rare earth elements (REEs) > SCT Stack

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