Tokenization Stopped Auditioning
Every asset class now has a live deployment. Most of the tokens don’t move. That gap is not a flaw in the thesis — it is the investment map.
Pascal Bouvier, MiddleGame Ventures · October 2026
I called the convergence of centralized and decentralized finance “OmniFi” in November 2020, and wrote in July 2022 that funds would issue tokenized shares. BlackRock launched its tokenized Treasury fund twenty months after that second piece. I mention the dates not to take a bow — my 2020 piece also cited a forecast of 10% of GDP tokenized by 2027, and reality will miss that badly — but because 2026 is the year the calls stopped being calls. Tokenization stopped auditioning.
Close to $39 billion of tokenized real-world assets now sit onchain, stablecoins excluded. That count only includes tokens able to leave the platform that issued them; it leaves out ledgers such as Figure’s $23 billion book of home-equity loans, which live onchain but cannot move. Every major asset class has a live, named, institutional deployment. Treasuries and money-market funds close to $15 billion, with BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree — the last with SEC relief for 24/7 dealing — and now JPMorgan. About $5 billion of tokenized gold. Equities tradable as tokens in more than 120 countries. Dubai’s land registry putting title deeds onchain, with secondary trading live since February; our portfolio company Ctrl Alt, which has put more than $1.8 billion of assets onchain, runs those rails. Not pilots. Products, with assets, customers and regulators attached.
From whether to where
The regulators stopped debating whether and started competing over where. The SEC approved Nasdaq’s tokenized order book in March — tokenization inside the regulated perimeter, not around it. In September the SEC went further. Two days after the Senate failed, 49 votes to 50, to advance the CLARITY Act, it issued a five-year “innovation exemption” that lets tokenized US-listed stocks trade onchain, under conditions of which one matters most: the token must carry the same voting and dividend rights as the share. The same month it proposed the first rewrite of its transfer-agent rules in forty years, allowing a blockchain to serve as the master shareholder file. Congress could not pass its bill; the agencies used the powers they already had. The market answered within three weeks. DTCC’s tokenization service, with more than fifty firms signed up, goes live this month, and on October 4 OKXICE — the venture between the owner of the New York Stock Exchange and the crypto exchange OKX — filed to trade tokens of 63 NYSE-listed companies around the clock, in permissioned pools settled in stablecoins, with the full rights of the share attached. Issuers have thirty days to object, and at least one already has.
Europe is building too, in its own dialect. The European Commission proposed lifting the DLT Pilot Regime’s cap from €6 billion to €100 billion and removing its time limits; if the co-legislators agree by the end of 2027, as expected, Europe will have the world’s largest regulated regime for tokenized securities. On September 21 the Eurosystem switched on Pontes, which settles tokenized securities in central-bank money — four DLT platforms and thirteen banks were connected on day one, on TARGET business days only until 2028 — and the ECB began preparing to invest a small portion of its own funds in tokenized securities. And Luxembourg, in its Blockchain Law IV, created a new supervised role — the control agent, a DLT register-keeper that replaces the central account keeper and the custody chain beneath it. My home jurisdiction created a startup category by statute. This is a core theme for us.
The number that matters more
Now the number that matters more than any of the above. Of roughly $60 billion in tokenized products, $32.9 billion showed zero weekly transfers this summer — 910 of the 1,289 assets worth more than $100,000, seven in ten. Some $27 billion of that dormant value sits in tokens that were never meant to move, loans recorded on a ledger rather than traded on one. The rest is the finding that matters: 62 assets hold 88% of all the value and five hold half; tokenized real estate, $227 million of transferable tokens across 108 assets, had 153 active addresses in the whole of last month. The ECB finds that tokenized bonds price about 14 basis points tighter at issuance than their conventional twins — and, in the same breath, little evidence of any secondary trading at all. The skeptics are right about the present. Issuance is solved. Liquidity is not, outside Treasuries and a short list of products that behave like cash.
Here is what the dormancy statistic actually reveals. The industry spent six years building supply-side infrastructure — issuance platforms, registries, standards — and almost none of the demand side: distribution, market making, regulated venues where a token finds a buyer. I wrote in 2022 that distribution would be the choke point. It was, and it is. Note what the SEC’s September exemption actually licenses: trading venues and the liquidity providers inside them, not issuers. Washington has worked out which half is missing. Our portfolio company Keyrock has worked that half since 2017. It is a Brussels market maker that quotes digital assets and stablecoins across 85 venues, including Societe Generale’s euro stablecoin, and Standard Chartered’s venture arm led its latest round in March at a $1.1 billion valuation. The companies that solve tokenized-asset distribution and liquidity capture the second half of the value chain, and the second half is where the fees live.
The tokenized-equity boom carries the same shape. Some 4.2 million wallets now hold a tokenized stock, more than forty times a year ago; of all the wallets that hold any tokenized real-world asset, four in five hold a stock. Wallets, not people, and a Binance fee holiday swelled the count; even so, Dune’s stricter tally of active holders passed a million this year. A real, global, retail demand signal. But most of the products are not shares. They are wrappers — a claim on shares that someone else holds, with no voting rights and no direct claim on the company. ESMA put it plainly in September: one-to-one backing is not one-to-one title, and when ownership is recorded offchain there is no onchain source of truth. The world’s exchanges had already written to three regulators. The winners will be whoever closes the gap between the token and the share: legal wrappers, registries, investor-rights infrastructure. The SEC has just made closing that gap a condition of its exemption. Boring words. Large market.
Watch what the retail apps actually do. Robinhood sells tokenized price exposure to US stocks in more than 120 countries, and when an issuer it never asked objected — AMC’s chief executive called the tokens “vile” — it promised in September to redeem them one-for-one into shares and to add voting. Yet when Robinhood and Revolut, more than 100 million customers between them, opened private markets to retail this year, neither used a token: Robinhood listed a closed-end fund on the NYSE; Revolut distributes Apollo, Ares, Hamilton Lane and Partners Group funds from one euro. That is tokenization in spirit rather than in form. The apps have taken the promise — a euro to start, anyone eligible, assets that used to require €100,000 and a private banker — and delivered it through wrappers regulators already trust. An interim step, not a destination. The day the wrapper is the token, with the right to the asset carried onchain rather than in a fund built around it, these distribution machines become the demand side the dormant tokens are waiting for.
Chains commoditize, standards compound
Underneath the assets, two architectures compete. Trust by policy — networks like Canton, built and bankrolled by Goldman, DTCC, Nasdaq, BNY, HSBC and their peers, where privacy is configured and each application decides who may take part. Trust by proof — public chains with cryptographic compliance, like the five US regional banks building a network to settle insured deposits through zero-knowledge proofs. Both are winning, in different rooms. A third force complicates both: payment companies shipping their own chains. Stripe and Robinhood have; Circle’s Arc went live in September with BlackRock, DTCC and Visa among its validators. My read is the same across every corner of this market: chains commoditize; standards and licensed operators compound. The permissioned-token standard that now carries more than $32 billion was born in Luxembourg, and DTCC joined its association last year. Standards outlive chains.
Where we invest
The forecasts disagree by a factor of fifty — $600 billion of tokenized fund assets by 2030 on the narrow definition, $30 trillion by 2034 on the widest. The spread is definitional, not directional. I learned in 2020 not to underwrite the number. We underwrite the layer that wins at any adoption speed, and three of our companies already sit on it: Ctrl Alt on issuance, registry and compliance, licensed where it operates and indifferent to which chain prevails; Keyrock on liquidity, for assets that have been issued but do not yet trade; and One Trading on the regulated venue, the first in Europe authorized under both MiFID II and MiCA. What we hunt next is the demand side this piece describes: secondary liquidity for tokenized private assets, the control agents and registries Luxembourg created by statute, collateral that moves between tokenized funds, deposits and stablecoins, and the investor-rights infrastructure that turns a token into a share — which the SEC has just made the price of admission. The tokens exist. Someone has to make them move. That someone is who we fund.
