Let’s start with the picture I laid out yesterday.

Imagine a medieval farmer handing over his fields to a moneylender.

Each year, the harvest from the lands pays the loan. Season after season, the debt shrinks. One day, the lender hands the land back.

No foreclosure. No surprise rate hikes. No sheriff at the door.

That ancient setup had a name—the vif gage—or the “living pledge.” It was a loan that paid itself off through the natural yield of the asset.

The mort gage, on the other hand, was the death pledge. Payment schedules, penalties, forced sales.

These days, most have forgotten the vifgage even existed.

But crypto builders? They’ve been reinventing it without realizing it.

Let’s break down what that revival might look like.

Medieval Heart, Smart-Contract Brain

The mechanics are simple.

You lock an income-producing asset—a property NFT, a tokenized business, a yield-bearing vault deposit—into a smart contract.

All the revenue that asset generates (assuming it’s all on-chain) automatically flows toward the loan.

No monthly payments. No human servicer. No arbitrary rule changes.

The asset pays its own ransom.

Projects like Alchemix already run this in crypto. Deposit DAI, borrow alUSD, and the yield from your DAI slowly erases your debt.

Medieval farmers once used wheat to pay down loans. Alchemix uses “Yearn.” Different centuries. Same principle.

The next step? Tokenized real income streams: Rental vaults. Solar vaults. Freight vaults. Business revenue vaults.

Each one is a vifgage in disguise. The asset itself carries the burden.

Tokenizing Cashflow

The mortgage persists for one simple reason: the bank gets paid first.

Tokenization flips that.

Every transaction is peer-to-peer.

Instead of borrowing and praying the bank doesn’t change the rules, the borrower can tokenize future cashflow and sell it directly to investors.

A musician tokenizes a slice of future streaming revenue. A gym tokenizes a slice of future monthly memberships. A solar farm tokenizes a slice of power sales.

The loan is built on the future productivity of the asset, not the human. The investors aren’t collecting interest; they’re collecting yield. Once that yield equals the agreed-upon return, the token retires.

Debt over. Asset freed.

That’s a vifgage in everything but name. And crypto plays the role the medieval courts never could: enforcing it autonomously, instantly, transparently, and without a landlord in a wig.

All the pieces exist today.

Oracles to verify. NFTs to represent ownership. DAOs to coordinate. On-chain revenue to fund the payoff. And contracts that can’t be bullied, bribed, or “called in early.”

Medieval simplicity. Crypto automation.

Why Crypto Wants the Vifgage

If banks looked at the vifgage, they’d see “low margin, slow payoff, no foreclosure penalties.”

Crypto sees something else entirely.

Predictable on-chain yield.No liquidation cascades.No 2008-style implosions.

For DAOs and tokenized lending pools, the vifgage is a dream: steady yield, real-world cashflow, and none of the volatility that usually sets DeFi on fire.

And for borrowers? It’s a breath of fresh air in a world suffocating under fine print written by demons.

A vifgage says: Let the asset do the work. Let time do the lifting. Let the loan dissolve naturally, like a candle burning down.

There’s also a deeper incentive.

Crypto is hungry for real things—yield that doesn’t depend on hype cycles or reflexive leverage loops.

Putting businesses, farmland, or IP rights (or whatever) into self-extinguishing structures ties DeFi to something solid.

It’s a bridge out of the casino and into the real economy.

The Life Pledge Returns

The medievals built the vifgage because they wanted fairness baked into the deal itself.

The whole point was to prevent predatory lending and avoid the abuses that came with the death-pledge mortgage.

Medieval courts and canon law were deeply suspicious of usury and wanted the deal to be:

• Self-executing

• fair to both parties

• hard to “game”

• proportional to the asset’s actual productivity

No tricks. No traps. Just a simple understanding: If the land is alive, the pledge is alive. If the land pays, the debt dies.

Tokenization lets us resurrect that idea.

Crypto makes it possible to encode a fairness mechanism into modern finance with perfect enforcement and zero predation.

A smart contract doesn’t lose paperwork. It doesn’t “forget” what the lender promised. It doesn’t wake up one morning and decide to foreclose.

It executes the deal faithfully until the last unit of yield extinguishes the last unit of debt.

That is the soul of the vifgage.

And if crypto gets this right—legally, technically, socially—we could see the biggest change in the borrower-lender relationship since the birth of the mort gage itself…

And I, for one, am on board.