The Assetizer · 17 September 2026 · 1 min read
Three Signs That Tokenization Will Indeed Take Over the World
Ten years ago the blockchain community’s mantra was “tokenize all the things.” Today the off-chain world seems increasingly serious about doing just that.
This newsletter is part of The Assetizer, GenTwo's thought leadership platform.
In our recent Structured Products on Digital Assets Summit, Archax’s Nick Cogswell told me that they are seeing a huge jump in volumes of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).
The numbers bear him out. Data show that the value of on-chain RWAs—excluding stablecoins—almost tripled from around US$11.8 billion in mid-2025 to US$33.5 billion in early July 2026, a rise of roughly 184%. That does not necessarily mean that liquidity or secondary-market trading has grown at the same pace. But it is a striking increase in the amount of real-world value being issued and represented on-chain.
For someone like me who has been around blockchain for a while, the reaction is not necessarily “how cool is that,” but rather more along the lines of “what took so long?”
I remember back in the heady days of 2016, when we saw the first real interest in blockchain technology from banks and large enterprises, the mantra in the blockchain world was “tokenize all the things.”
And for good reason. The technology not only promises incredible benefits for financial infrastructure, from atomic settlement to programmable money. It also works. As people in the space keep telling me, today tokenization is fairly well understood and fairly easy to do.
The problem is not the tech. It is the real-world infrastructure around it. While tokens can reduce transaction and product-issuance costs significantly, as Nick reminded us in the webinar, “that assumes the whole plumbing is digital, which is still work in progress at the moment.”
This makes significant infrastructure moves to make the world safe for tokenization an interesting topic for The Assetizer. And so I decided to take a look.
Here are my current candidates for the top three signs that tokenization will soon take over the world.
Sign One: The SEC Is Open to It
On 1 September, the SEC proposed its first comprehensive modernisation in decades of the rules governing registered transfer agents—the firms that maintain issuer records, register transfers and administer much of the ownership machinery behind securities markets. The consultation runs until 3 November.
Why does this matter? Because putting a security on a blockchain does not, by itself, establish the legally authoritative record of ownership in US markets. A token may be a highly efficient wrapper and transfer mechanism, but the issuer’s records, transfer-agent processes, securities law and the relevant custody and depository arrangements still matter.
Somebody still has to establish who owns what, administer corporate actions and deal with the awkward realities of restrictions, lost credentials, frozen assets and contested transfers.
Switzerland has gone further in recognising properly constituted ledger-based securities under its legal framework. But even there, the legal effect depends on the relevant register, the terms of the instrument and the wider issuance and custody arrangements.
Commissioner Hester M. Peirce, speaking in support of the proposal, noted that transfer agents and other market participants are increasingly looking toward a future in which “many shares will be tokenized.”
If the world’s largest capital market by orders of magnitude updates its ownership and transfer plumbing to accommodate tokenized securities, that is a meaningful sign.
Sign Two: Europe’s Got It Now for Wholesale Payments
A tokenized security is only half a transaction. For tokenization to work at institutional scale, the payment side has to work too: securities and cash must move together, with certainty that both legs have settled.
That is why the Eurosystem’s Pontes initiative matters. It is designed to link market DLT platforms with TARGET Services, allowing wholesale DLT transactions to settle in central-bank money. Its initial launch is planned for the third quarter of 2026.
This is an attempt to bring delivery-versus-payment—the basic safety mechanism of wholesale securities markets—into the tokenized world. Pontes is designed to support synchronized settlement between the DLT asset leg and the cash leg, with finality for the central-bank-money leg achieved through T2.
The asset token may be clever, programmable and transferable. But without reliable settlement money and legal finality, it remains hard to use in serious institutional workflows.
Of course, central-bank money is not the only possible payment mechanism for tokenized transactions. Commercial-bank money, tokenized deposits and other forms of digital settlement money may also play a role. But the ability to connect DLT markets to the Eurosystem’s existing settlement infrastructure is a major step.
Sign Three: DTCC Will Give It to You If You Want It
The third sign comes from DTCC, the organization at the center of US post-trade market infrastructure. Its depository subsidiary, DTC, is working towards a voluntary service to tokenize assets already held in DTC custody, with a launch targeted for the second half of 2026.
What makes this important is not simply that another big financial institution is “doing blockchain.” It is that tokenization is being considered inside an established custody, settlement and safekeeping framework—rather than as an attempt to build a parallel universe outside it.
DTCC sees potential for faster and more flexible transfers, smart-contract-enabled processing, new trading models and, crucially, better collateral mobility.
That last point matters enormously. The real prize is not just the ability to trade a tokenized asset. It is the ability to use it efficiently in financing, margin and collateral-management workflows.
Those benefits are still prospective rather than proven across the market at scale. But that is precisely why the initiative is important: it would bring tokenization closer to the systems in which institutions already hold, settle, finance and mobilize assets.
Wait no more
We have waited a long time for tokenization to take over the world, and likely will have to wait a while longer. But the portents are clearer by the day.
Tokenization does not take over simply because by making it possible to mint a token. It takes over when legal ownership, settlement money and post-trade infrastructure can all recognize, move and service the same asset.
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