Fifty years ago, funds needed to be mailed to complete a transaction. Twenty years ago, cross-border transactions took "several days." Today, millisecond-level transactions are no longer something to boast about. The real transformation isn't about speed, but about reshaping "how assets exist." BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and COO Rob Goldstein have made a sober assessment of this era: In the future, stocks, bonds, real estate, funds, and even currencies will become "a line of code on the blockchain." This isn't a crypto story; this is a "moment of financial reconstruction." Fifty years ago, money moved as slowly as mail. When one of us (Larry) started his career in 1976, transactions were conducted by telephone and settled with paper receipts sent by courier. In 1977, a technology called SWIFT enabled standardized electronic messaging between banks, reducing transaction times from days to minutes. Today, transactions between New York and London are executed in milliseconds. Now, the financial industry is entering the next major evolution in market infrastructure—an evolution that allows assets to be transferred faster and more securely than the systems that have served investors for decades. It began in 2009 when a developer using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin, a shared digital ledger that records transactions without intermediaries. A few years later, the same technology—blockchain—led to something even more transformative: tokenization. Tokenization involves recording ownership on a digital ledger. It allows virtually any asset, from real estate to corporate debt or currency, to exist on a single digital record that participants can independently verify. Initially, the financial world—including us—struggled to see this grand idea. Tokenization was intertwined with the crypto craze, which often appeared speculative. But in recent years, the traditional financial industry has seen what lies beneath the hype: tokenization can dramatically expand the world of investable assets, beyond the currently dominant listed stocks and bonds. Tokenized assets offer two major benefits. First, it offers the potential for instant settlement of transactions. Today's markets operate on different settlement timelines, leaving buyers and sellers at risk that one party may be unable to fulfill its obligations. Standardizing instant settlement in global markets would be another leap forward beyond what SWIFT once achieved. Second, private market assets still rely heavily on paper—manual processes, custom settlements, and records that have failed to keep pace with the development of other parts of the financial industry. Tokenization can replace paper with code, reducing friction that makes asset transactions costly and slow. It can transform large, unlisted holdings like real estate or infrastructure into smaller, more accessible units, thereby expanding market participation that has long been dominated by large institutions. Technology alone cannot eliminate all barriers. Regulation and investor protection remain crucial. But by reducing costs and complexity, tokenization can provide more investors with more ways to diversify their investments. Early signs of progress are already emerging. Tokens representing traditional "real-world" financial assets (stocks, bonds, etc.) still represent a small share of global equity and fixed-income markets, but are growing rapidly—up by approximately 300% in the past 20 months. Many early adoptions are occurring in the developing world, where banking services are limited. Nearly three-quarters of cryptocurrency holders reside outside the West. Meanwhile, economies that built modern finance—the US, UK, and EU—are lagging behind, at least in terms of where transactions take place. Admittedly, many of the companies most likely to lead the transformation of the tokenized financial system, including the dominant players in the stablecoin space, are American companies. But this early advantage is not to be taken for granted. If history is any guide, today's tokenization is roughly equivalent to the internet in 1996—when Amazon had only sold $16 million worth of books, and three of today's "Big Seven" tech giants hadn't even been founded yet. Tokenization may develop at the pace of the internet—faster than most people expect, achieving tremendous growth over the next few decades. It won't replace the existing financial system anytime soon. Instead, it can be seen as a bridge being built simultaneously from both sides of a river, converging in the middle. On one side are traditional institutions. On the other side are digital-first innovators: stablecoin issuers, fintech companies, and public blockchains. The two are less in competition and more in learning how to interoperate. In the future, people won't put stocks and bonds in one portfolio and cryptocurrencies in another. One day, various assets will be able to be bought, sold, and held through a single digital wallet. The task of policymakers and regulators is clear: to help build this bridge quickly and securely. The best approach is not to create a completely new rulebook for digital markets, but to update our existing rules so that traditional and tokenized markets can work together. We have already seen the power of this connectivity. The first emerging market exchange-traded funds (ETFs) connected stock markets in more than 20 countries into a single fund, making global investing easier. Bond ETFs did the same for fixed income, connecting dealer markets to public exchanges, enabling investors to trade more efficiently. Now there are spot Bitcoin ETFs, and even digital assets are on traditional exchanges. Every innovation builds bridges. The same principle applies to tokenization. Regulators should strive for consistency: risk should be judged by its nature, not by how it is packaged. Even if a bond exists on the blockchain, it is still a bond. But innovation needs "guardrails": clear buyer protection measures to ensure tokenized products are secure and transparent; robust counterparty risk standards to prevent contagion of shocks to the platform; and digital identity verification systems so that those who want to trade and invest have the same confidence as when swiping a card or wire transferring money. Andrew Ross Sorkin, in his new book about the 1929 stock market crash, revisits the failures that led to the birth of the modern financial system. Some were technological: on "Black Tuesday," stock tickers lagged behind by hours, unable to keep up with the surge in trading volume. Others were institutional: a financial system that developed faster than its security guarantees could keep pace. Tokenization can modernize the infrastructure that still makes parts of the financial system slow and expensive, bringing more people into the world's most powerful engine of wealth creation: the markets. But, as 1929 teaches us, every step toward increased participation must be accompanied by updated security guarantees. Tokenization must achieve two things: faster development and secure development, while simultaneously building trust.
JinseFinance
Sanya
Bitcoinist
Nulltx