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In Kolwezi, a mining town in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chinese-operated trucks haul copper and cobalt ore around the clock. The DRC supplies over 70% of the world’s cobalt, a metal essential for the batteries that power electric vehicles and smartphones. Yet the country remains desperately poor. Its government collects a fraction of the revenue that flows from its soil. Roads are rutted. Schools are crumbling. The vicious irony is evident to anyone who looks.

Now comes an idea that sounds either ingenious or fantastical, depending on your appetite for techno-utopianism: tokenise the cobalt. Proponents suggest that Congo could issue digital bonds backed by its mineral reserves, recorded on a blockchain and sold directly to global investors. Smart contracts would automatically enforce spending rules. Every franc raised and spent would be visible on a public ledger. The middlemen who have enriched themselves while Congo stayed poor would be cut out.

The concept is not as outlandish as it first appears. Tokenisation of real-world assets has grown from a crypto curiosity into a $22.6bn market. BlackRock’s tokenised treasury fund reached $500m faster than any traditional exchange-traded fund. South Africa recorded the continent’s first tokenised corporate bond in 2024. Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya are all piloting blockchain-based debt platforms. A partnership announced in October aims to tokenise $5.5bn in infrastructure assets across Africa, starting in Uganda. The plumbing, in other words, is being built.

Congo would seem an ideal candidate. Its cobalt reserves are worth tens of trillions of dollars at current prices. Gécamines, the state mining company, holds stakes in many of the country’s largest operations but has struggled with debt, mismanagement and opacity. The IMF suspended a $530m loan in 2012 after Gécamines failed to explain how it ceded mining assets to a company in the British Virgin Islands. A tokenised bond, with every transaction visible on-chain, would, in theory, make such manoeuvres impossible.

The numbers suggest urgency. Mining accounts for 46% of government revenues and 99% of exports. Yet cobalt prices have halved since January 2023, falling from $50,000 per tonne to around $24,000 per tonne. CMOC, a Chinese company, and Glencore, a Swiss one, control 70% of Congolese cobalt exports. In February 2025, the government imposed an export embargo in a bid to prop up prices, a blunt instrument that has left cobalt piling up in warehouses while miners continue to dig. A new quota system now allocates export volumes, with the two foreign giants capturing 58% of the available slots.

A tokenised sovereign bond could, in principle, let Congo bypass this dependence. Rather than borrowing in dollars or euros at punishing rates, or negotiating opaque resource-for-infrastructure deals with Chinese state firms, the government could tap global retail and institutional investors directly. Fractional ownership would lower the entry barrier. Blockchain settlement would cut transaction costs. Embedded smart contracts could require that a fixed percentage of proceeds flow to schools, clinics or roads, with compliance verified automatically.

All of which sounds lovely. The difficulties begin when one considers how such a scheme would actually work. Tokenising a bond is relatively straightforward. Tokenising the cobalt reserves that back it is not. Mineral reserves are geological estimates, not warehouse inventory. They require independent verification, which in turn requires expertise and access that Congo’s government may be reluctant to provide. The reserves exist underground, in unstable regions, often on concessions already pledged to foreign operators. Bondholders would need to trust not just the blockchain but the entire apparatus of Congolese mining governance, which has not historically rewarded such trust.

Smart contracts, moreover, can only enforce what happens on-chain. They cannot prevent a government from spending bond proceeds on armoured vehicles rather than hospitals, provided it routes the funds through intermediary accounts. They cannot stop artisanal miners from extracting cobalt outside the formal system. They cannot compel foreign operators to pay taxes they are skilled at minimising. The technology solves a record-keeping problem. Congo’s problems are somewhat larger than that.

Investors would face their own quandaries. A cobalt-backed bond is, in effect, a bet on commodity prices, political stability and the enforceability of claims against a sovereign that has defaulted before. The liquidity promised by tokenisation depends on buyers materialising on the other side of trades. In a crisis, that liquidity tends to vanish. A token on a blockchain is only as good as the legal framework that recognises it, and Congo’s courts are not known for their independence.

None of this means the idea is worthless. Transparency has value even when it cannot guarantee honesty. A public ledger of mineral revenues would make theft harder to hide, even if it could not prevent theft outright. External verification of reserves, demanded by bondholders, would generate data the government could use for other purposes. The discipline imposed by smart contracts, however imperfect, exceeds that of traditional bond covenants, which nobody reads until default looms.

The deeper question is whether tokenisation addresses the right problem. Congo’s curse is not a shortage of clever financing mechanisms but a surfeit of corruption, conflict and weak institutions. Blockchain cannot fix governance. It can only make bad governance more visible. Whether visibility alone can shame the shameless is a bet that technologists are more eager to make than historians. Congo has been promising to reform its mining sector for decades. Putting that promise on a distributed ledger does not make it more credible. It just makes it easier to verify when it is broken.