Key Points:
- Fidelity’s Matthew Horne said institutional efforts to move financial assets onchain have accelerated to a point where major participants are unlikely to reverse course.
- Tokenization can give asset managers access to new markets and improve investor access, strengthening the case for moving traditional financial products onto blockchain infrastructure.
- UBS expects Treasuries and equities to drive significantly greater onchain activity if major market infrastructure providers adopt tokenized custody and settlement systems.
Financial institutions are increasingly moving toward tokenized financial markets as asset managers and infrastructure providers explore ways to bring traditional securities onto blockchain networks. Fidelity Investments’ Matthew Horne said the institutional push has reached a stage where a reversal is becoming increasingly difficult.
Speaking at Longitude Singapore, Horne, Fidelity’s head of digital asset strategists, said the past 18 months had seen a significant acceleration in institutional efforts to build an onchain financial system. He argued that tokenization provides structural advantages while allowing asset managers to reach investors and markets that can be difficult to access through traditional investment products.
Tokenization Opens New Markets
US asset managers have particular incentives to tokenize assets because blockchain-based products can potentially improve investor access and expand distribution into new markets.
The shift is increasingly visible in adoption data. RWA.xyz data cited in the source shows that demand for tokenized assets increased 41% over the previous 30 days, while the number of addresses holding tokenized real-world assets surpassed 493,000. The figure excludes stablecoins and measures holders of tokenized real-world assets.
The growing holder base suggests that tokenization is expanding beyond infrastructure experiments and into a broader investor market.
Treasuries and Equities Could Accelerate Growth
UBS digital-assets business development head Ka Yan Chan said US Treasuries and equities could become major drivers of onchain growth because they represent core components of traditional investment portfolios.
Chan argued that the transition from billions to trillions of dollars in tokenized assets could depend on large financial-market infrastructure providers moving their own systems onto tokenized platforms. Institutions such as the Federal Reserve and Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation could play an important role if custody and settlement infrastructure evolves toward blockchain-based systems.
Other market participants could then build distribution and investment products on top of that infrastructure, potentially accelerating adoption without requiring every institution to independently rebuild the underlying market architecture.
US Regulatory Developments Support Tokenization
Regulatory developments in the United States are also creating additional pathways for tokenized securities.
In December 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a no-action letter to a DTCC subsidiary, allowing it to provide a securities-market tokenization service.
The SEC also approved a temporary exemption in September that permits limited trading of tokenized US stocks on certain onchain venues. Earlier on Thursday, Securitize announced trading for tokenized shares representing a dozen widely held US stocks, including security entitlements.
These developments provide examples of how traditional securities infrastructure and blockchain-based markets could increasingly operate alongside one another.
Capital Moving Onchain
The broader tokenization market is also attracting substantial capital. According to the source, more than $1.2 billion moved onchain during the previous 30 days, bringing the combined value across stablecoins and tokenized assets above $323 billion.
The figures highlight the expanding scale of blockchain-based financial infrastructure, although stablecoins continue to represent a substantial portion of the overall onchain economy.
Standard Chartered global head of digital asset research Geoff Kendrick has projected that tokenized real-world assets could reach $4 trillion by the end of 2028.
Outlook
The institutional tokenization market is moving from experimentation toward broader financial-market integration, with asset managers, banks and market infrastructure providers increasingly developing products and systems around blockchain-based assets. The next major step could come from the tokenization of large traditional asset classes such as government bonds and equities. If custody, settlement and distribution infrastructure continue to migrate onchain, tokenization could become an increasingly integrated component of mainstream capital markets rather than a separate digital-asset ecosystem.
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