Not long ago, blockchain was a technology that Wall Street loved to mock. It was a ledger for Bitcoin speculators, but not for serious money. Over the past three years, the largest names in finance have begun "tokenizing" the assets they manage.
BlackRock runs a Treasury fund on a public blockchain. Franklin Templeton, Fidelity and JPMorgan have built their own versions. Tokenizing an asset means creating a digital token on a blockchain that represents ownership of it, the way a stock certificate once did on paper.
Because the token lives on a shared ledger rather than in one bank's private database, it can, in theory, be transferred instantly, held in an ordinary digital wallet, pledged as collateral to any lender, and settled without the days of paperwork that still govern most of finance. Money can be sent as easily as an email, without needing to go through a broker. However, the infrastructure we have built so far holds little resemblance to that promise.
Most tokenized assets today can be bought from their issuer and sold back to their issuer. They cannot be traded on an exchange, moved to a wallet the issuer does not control, or used as collateral anywhere else. The European Central Bank (ECB) issued a bulletin in April 2026 warning that although digital asset issuance has increased dramatically, there is still a stark lack of on-chain liquidity.
Modern tokenization is equivalent to scanning your paper stock certificate into a computer but still having to visit one particular branch of one particular bank to do anything with it. Our records are becoming digital…but what’s the advantage for users? If tokenized asset usage is stalling, it’s fair to ask why the coverage has been so triumphant.
Reports of a tokenization boom are everywhere: banks are issuing research notes, consulting firms are forecasting a market worth many trillions by 2030, and executives on earnings calls are describing the technology as the future of their firms. We’re seeing this disconnect because the industry has chosen a flattering way of keeping score. Industry leaders primarily track how much traditional asset value has been recorded on blockchains, and the totals have grown fast enough to look like proof of adoption.
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