Designing for Permanence: Mechanism Design Challenges in Century-Scale Real-World Asset Tokenization

Abstract

Real-world asset tokens that reference physical objects with multi-century lifespans face design challenges absent from short-horizon financial instruments. This paper identifies seven such challenges — permissionless operation, death detection without death incentives, decentralized registry bootstrapping, dispute resolution without central authority, verification at scale, indefinite funding, and century-scale system durability — and presents an integrated design framework that resolves all seven. The framework is demonstrated through a deployed conservation protocol that tokenizes old-growth trees as ERC-721 non-fungible tokens, with a permanent freeze mechanism that renders tokens non-transferable upon confirmed tree death. The protocol is live on Base L2 mainnet with twelve genesis trees minted and source code publicly available.