Brian J Esposito has been working with tokenisation long enough to remember when it was still a niche experiment, closer to the early days of digital wallets and the first real-world purchases made with Bitcoin than today’s institutional forecasts. For him, the appeal was never confined to price or speculation. It was the arrival of a new mechanism for conducting commerce and recording ownership, with the potential to broaden participation in assets that have historically been reserved for a narrow investor class.
Esposito is now applying that thinking through DiamondLake (OTC:DLMI), a public company he took over as CEO in August 2023. The company itself dates back to 1950, originally spanning mining and real estate activities. Esposito describes his approach as an evolution rather than a rupture.
“My whole purpose was just giving it a new industry-agnostic identity in the market,” he says, while remaining close enough to the original foundations to perhaps one day revisit mining through tokenising assets such as precious metals.
The positioning is deliberately long-term. Esposito is explicit that he is not building for volatility or short-term sentiment. “We’re very calculated and systematic on our growth and approach,” he says. “We’re not in a hurry to do anything wrong. We’re not in a hurry to make a mistake.” He links that patience to the regulatory cycle, describing the business as having waited for policy change in the United States, rather than forcing momentum before the conditions were ready.
Where Esposito is particularly clear is in how he defines tokenisation, and why he believes the market still misunderstands it. He distinguishes his model from projects that use the term as a slogan. “A lot of companies say they are doing tokenisation, but there is little substance behind it,” he says. His alternative is a hybrid approach that starts with the fundamentals of building companies and then adds tokenisation as a financial mechanism rather than a replacement for sound business practice.
“Build and grow companies as you would build any company, issue debt, sell equity, bank lines of credit, leverage your assets, utilising cash flows,” he says. “And by the way, we have this hybrid model, so we can communicate with every type of investor, and we can, very simply add tokenisation to the business model of a company.”
For Esposito, tokenisation is not a novelty. It is the next step in the evolution of commerce. “We’re not trading seashells anymore,” he says. “There’s always been an evolution of financial mechanisms to conduct commerce and trade. This is simply the next iteration of how transactions are conducted.”
He describes the advantage with practical simplicity: ownership can be recorded on chain, publicly verifiable, and transferable in a way that reduces the friction and doubt that surround traditional asset transfers.
“It’s publicly proved that someone owns an asset or a fraction of an asset,” he says. “All this is a public record, which makes it very efficient.” In his view, that verification reduces risk for buyers and investors, particularly around whether an asset is genuinely owned and transferable. “There’s a big trust factor,” he says.
He is equally direct on the three strands he sees inside tokenisation: capital formation, ownership infrastructure, and community. The financial piece came first, largely because the risks were immediate. Esposito recalls a learning curve in working with banks and legal teams to avoid accounts being turned off or regulatory problems emerging. Then he noticed something else, as a marketer and brand-builder, that traditional finance rarely produces: intense community engagement. “I saw people engaged around the clock. I have never seen that kind of loyalty or connection as a marketer,” he says. “People are up all night on Twitter, and then on Discord and Telegram, believing, talking and sharing.” He describes it as the formation of an “army”, a community that can become a public voice for a project when it is aligned, valued, and treated as part of the build rather than as exit liquidity.
That language matters, because Esposito is sharply critical of the behaviour he sees across much of the market. “Everyone talks about tokenisation, but 99% of people just want to trade,” he says. He rejects the cycle of hype, volume, and short-term exit, and he carries that rejection into how he intends DiamondLake to behave as a public vehicle.
“We’re not a pump and dump. We’re not a hype machine. I’m a long-term builder,” he says.
He argues that when a business is properly managed and profitable, liquidity becomes less central than durability and return, because the company should be able to support its own market through buybacks and treasury accumulation.
“If a token holder ever wishes to exit, I would want to buy that token, or the company should buy it, because we know its value,” he says. “If you create this real loop of the right holders, the right businesses, the right management, the right profitability, I don’t care about the secondary market.”
Closed Loop
That closed-loop idea sits at the centre of how he frames real world asset tokenisation. The premise is straightforward: a real underlying asset or business that produces value, a token that represents participation, and a disciplined operating model that returns value to holders through revenue share, profit share or a comparable mechanism. “If you know how to build a business, you have seasoned management, and you use a token to bring capital or resources into that business or asset, while building something that generates a return for token holders,” he says, “they have an asset that is protected and valuable, growing in principal value, and producing earnings.”
Esposito’s ambition is not small. He describes a market that is now gaining credibility, not least through the way large institutions have started to discuss it publicly. He notes that when Larry Fink said everything would be tokenised, it shifted perception. He also references the size of the projected market as a driver for what DiamondLake is building. His stated aspiration is to become a practical platform for companies that want to tokenise but lack the legal, accounting and infrastructure.
“I believe we can build a Shopify-type model for companies that want to tokenise,” he says.
Underneath the mechanism sits an ethos that he returns to repeatedly: retail participation. Esposito describes himself as “very much for the underdog” and says he has been an underdog his entire life. He frames tokenisation as a technology that changes who can participate. “When I saw that anyone with a mobile phone and a digital wallet could buy into something, I realised it changes the landscape,” he says, describing a shift from “the one percenters being let into opportunities” to the wider population having a chance to own a fraction of an asset and build wealth.
He is blunt about why that matters. The world is full of people who can spare very little, yet are excluded from opportunity by design. He wants the threshold for participation to be close to zero. “They may only have three dollars,” he says. “And if they are putting 33% of their assets into something, my dream is that a dollar or two at the end of the month becomes life changing.” Scale is the point. Rather than raising from a small pool of wealthy participants, he wants millions of people involved. “Instead of going to a dozen or a hundred people to raise ten or a hundred million dollars to buy a business or to buy a building, a hotel, I want to invite millions of people and raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars,” he says. “We want these millions of people to continue to earn from the work that we’re doing.”
That ambition also drives his insistence on asset selection and due diligence. Once retail is invited in, he argues, the responsibility becomes heavier. “We need it to work properly,” he says. “We want to make sure those assets perform, and we want to make sure that we’re returning money back to these tokens.” His criteria are not only financial. He describes a diligence process that includes alignment with “ethics, integrity, morals and values and empathy,” and he is explicit about what he will not support. “I do not want to work with CEOs who raise capital and use it to fund a lavish lifestyle instead of investing in the business,” he says. “I want to see CEOs that are reinvesting into their businesses and are creating new products and technologies.”
Esposito speaks about tokenisation as a tool for resilience as well as investment. He imagines a world in which retail support can shore up balance sheets quickly, even in crisis, and prevent the kind of institutional collapse that destroys jobs and value. He points to the fragility of existing models and the way smaller institutions can be pushed out when incumbents feel threatened. In his telling, tokenisation offers a different route: broader participation, faster capital mobilisation, and fewer intermediaries extracting value.
There is a controlled excitement in how he describes this shift. Not because it will be easy, but because the direction is now clear. Institutions are beginning to acknowledge where markets are going, while builders are working out how to do it without repeating the same failures in a new form. Esposito’s wager is that real world asset tokenisation can succeed when it is treated as finance, not theatre: built on real assets, governed with discipline, and structured so that retail investors are participants rather than prey.
