Fintech 101: The Tokenization of Real World Financial Assets
How asset management is moving onchain at scale
Hi Fintech Futurists,
Today, we have a special edition for you, focusing on the tokenization of real-world assets — including equities, fixed income, and other investments.
As Nasdaq and LSE move towards implementing blockchain-based architectures, Stripe and Google compete on who can feed stablecoins to AI agents fastest, and SWIFT moves over to Ethereum, it’s more important than ever to understand what is going on with the underlying protocols.
We contributed to the report Real World Assets: The Practitioner’s Guide to highlight where tokenization stands today and where it is headed. The report features insights from some of the leading voices shaping the future of capital markets.
Check it out below, and we will walk through some highlights below.
Industry Leaders Shaping Tokenization
The report features insights and contributions from leading practitioners across tokenization, infrastructure, and institutional finance, including:
Mark Garabedian, Director of Digital Assets & Tokenization, Wellington Management
Nick Cherney, Head of Innovation, Janus Henderson
Sandy Kaul, EVP & Head of Innovation, Franklin Templeton
Will Peck, Head of Digital Assets, WisdomTree
Alex Gluchowski, Co-Founder & CEO, Matter Labs
Steven Goldfeder, CEO & Co-Founder, Offchain Labs
Aaron Gwak, Founder & CEO, Libeara
Lex Sokolin, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Generative Ventures
Bhaji Illuminati, CEO, Centrifuge
Kevin Miao, Head of Growth, Steakhouse Financial
Chris Yin, Co-Founder & CEO, Plume
Timm Reinsdorf, Co-Founder & CEO, Particula
Thomas Cowan, Head of Tokenization, Galaxy
Mark Greenberg, VP, Consumer Business & Product, Kraken
The guide was authored by Will Beeson, Founder & CEO of Uniform Labs, creators of the Multiliquid protocol, a Generative Ventures portfolio company.
Table of Contents
The guide delivers a practitioner-level breakdown of:
The logic of tokenization — why composability, not just digitization, will define the future of capital markets
How tokenized Treasuries, MMFs, and credit are emerging as the first scalable institutional products
How tokenized equities could unlock global access to stock markets
The evolving market infrastructure — from issuance platforms and custodians to compliance middleware, oracles, and onchain settlement rails
Why regulatory clarity in the U.S. and abroad is accelerating institutional adoption
A forward-looking view of the integration of tokenized assets into global finance, including collateral mobility, intraday liquidity, and automated distribution
Introduction to Onchain Real World Assets
The Logic of Tokenization
The logic of tokenization rests on a deceptively simple idea: take assets that today are trapped in fragmented, permissioned, and often outdated infrastructure, and move them onto programmable, global settlement rails. In practice, this means transforming a U.S. Treasury bill, a share in a money market fund (MMF), or a private loan into a digital token that can exist and move natively on a blockchain. This is not the same as digitizing finance, which has already happened across most of the economy. Rather, it is about creating digital assets that are mobile and composable by design.
Traditional digitization left market infrastructure siloed. Bank balances are digital but locked within individual ledgers. Securities are recorded electronically but reconciled across multiple custodians, central securities depositories, and clearing systems. Finance is efficient by twentieth-century standards, but it still involves multiple layers of intermediaries, time delays, and costs. A Treasury bond may be the safest asset in the world, but if it takes a day or more to settle, its potential as a source of instant collateral is limited.
Tokenization proposes a re-architecting of the financial system. Instead of assets being trapped in databases, they exist as tokens: bearer instruments secured by cryptography, transferable instantly between parties, composable with other assets and smart contracts, and programmable into software applications. As an analogy, consider the shift from paper mail to email: both systems deliver messages, but email collapses intermediaries, enables automation, and operates globally in real-time.
Critically, tokenization is not merely about making assets digital but about making them composable. A tokenized Treasury can be swapped atomically with a stablecoin. A tokenized loan can be deposited into a DeFi protocol and used as collateral. A tokenized fund share can be transferred globally without waiting on settlement cycles or asynchronous, off-chain reconciliation. It is this programmability and composability that create the opportunity for financial markets to function in ways that were not previously possible.
From Bitcoin to Stablecoins to RWAs
The evolution of tokenization can be traced through three distinct waves of innovation.
The first wave began with Bitcoin in 2009. Bitcoin was the original proof that digitally scarce bearer assets could exist. For the first time, digital money could be held and transferred without intermediaries, secured only by mathematics and decentralized consensus. This was revolutionary, but it would take years for the impact to be fully appreciated. Volatility made Bitcoin undesirable as a medium of exchange, and its architecture was sufficiently specialized to make broader financial applications unfeasible. Bitcoin proved that digital scarcity was possible, and the foundation was laid for further innovation.
The second wave arrived with Ethereum in 2015. Ethereum introduced smart contracts, creating a programmable financial layer on top of blockchain infrastructure. Out of this came decentralized finance, or DeFi, where lending, trading, and derivatives could be executed entirely on-chain. For the first time, financial primitives operated without banks or brokers. Initially, DeFi focused on crypto-native collateral — ETH, BTC, and governance tokens. The system was innovative but fragile, since its collateral base was volatile and disconnected from the real economy.
Early experiments in tokenizing assets date back to the early years of Ethereum. These issuances, often described as Security Token Offerings (STOs), faced a material problem around liquidity in market venues. While companies like Consensys, Tokeny, Securitize, and Vertalo announced many different private equity and bond issuances with banks like JPMorgan, Santander, and UBS, most of these issuances were proof of concept experiments on private enterprise chains.
There were two weak points in the process: (1) cash settlement in a widely accepted digital dollar did not exist, and (2) the market venues of private bank chains did not have secondary liquidity or interest from retail investors.
The third wave in the evolution of tokenization, beginning in earnest around 2020, brought stablecoins, real-world assets (RWAs) and financial incumbent adoption of public blockchains. Stablecoins like USDC and USDT bridged blockchain-based finance to the U.S. dollar, creating a stable unit of account and medium of exchange. Their adoption exploded, reaching hundreds of billions in circulation and trillions in annual settlement volume.
At the same time, tokenized RWAs began to emerge, including funds, real estate and alternative assets. These assets extended DeFi’s reach into the real world, linking the largest, deepest markets on earth to programmable rails.
In this report, we use the term tokenized assets, rather than Real World Assets (RWAs), to describe exposure to assets with intrinsic value, often financial instruments including securities, real property, physical commodities, IP, property rights or cash flows, instantiated in token form. Tokenized assets are distinct from other crypto assets, like Bitcoin and protocol tokens, whose value is linked to their usage or extrinsic factors.
Each wave built on the last. Bitcoin established digital scarcity. Ethereum introduced programmability. Stablecoins brought stability and scale. Tokenized RWAs now connect this programmable financial layer to traditional capital markets, creating the conditions for institutional adoption.
Why Now? Structural Drivers
The timing of tokenization’s acceleration is not coincidental. Several structural forces converged in the early 2020s to create a perfect environment for adoption.
The most immediate driver was the return of positive interest rates. After more than a decade of near-zero rates, the Federal Reserve’s hikes in 2022–23 lifted Treasury yields above four percent. Suddenly, the safest assets in the world offered attractive returns.
For stablecoin issuers sitting on tens of billions in reserves, for DeFi protocols searching for yield, and for global investors facing inflation, low-to-medium risk credit assets became highly attractive.
Stablecoins themselves provided another catalyst. By 2022, they had become the most widely used application on blockchain, proving that tokenized money could work at scale. Once stablecoins took hold, it was a short step to other types of tokenized real-world assets.
Institutional experimentation was also critical. Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, Wellington, BlackRock, Janus Henderson, Fidelity and many others have all launched live tokenized products, legitimizing the space. As investment into these assets grows, investment managers are demonstrating that regulated, institutional-grade, tokenized financial products are not only possible but commercially viable.
Technological readiness also played a role. Ethereum’s track record of stability and neutrality made it a credible platform for institutional activity, while alternative high-throughput blockchains like Ethereum L2s and Solana reduced transaction costs and improved performance. What had been excessively risky, slow and expensive rails for institutional use cases in 2017 had grown more compelling by 2023.
Finally, regulatory clarity with respect to tokenized assets has improved throughout the course of 2025, especially in the US, the world’s largest financial market. Further definition of digital asset market structure, custody, issuance and trading rules for regulated firms, along with accounting and prudential regulatory treatment of assets, will drive the next phase of tokenized asset market development.
Tokenization is thus the product of yield demand, technological maturity, institutional participation, and increasing regulatory clarity — all converging in a short window.
Market Size and Early Growth
Tokenized assets remain small relative to traditional markets, but their growth rates are striking. As of 2025, tokenized U.S. Treasuries represent only a few billion dollars in AUM, compared to a $20 trillion overall U.S. Treasury market. Stablecoins total approximately $280 billion, versus more than $18 trillion in U.S. bank deposits. Tokenized MMFs from leading issuers together hold billions, but this is still a rounding error relative to the $8 trillion global MMF market.
The relevant comparison may not be absolute scale but early adoption curves. ETFs in their first decade were dismissed as niche products. By the early 2000s, they had entered a steep growth trajectory that eventually reshaped investment management. Tokenized Treasuries are tracking a similar pattern, with exponential growth off a small base.
Crucially, RWA growth, broadly speaking, represents a transition in form factor of new and existing traditional assets. Unlike the uncollateralized creation of governance tokens and other cryptocurrencies in the crypto market, every dollar of new tokenized assets created is funded with a dollar of capital.
Download the full white paper to explore the evolving landscape of tokenized assets..
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Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Daniel, Michiel, Luke
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Love this!
!
Nice write up Will .