Wall Street's tokenization race gets the Forbes treatment

From Pilots to Market Plumbing

A Forbes feature published Monday puts Wall Street's tokenization push into sharp focus, arguing the industry has moved decisively past a decade of tentative pilots. At the center of that argument is @BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who has called tokenization "the next generation for markets" as mainstream financial institutions move real assets onto blockchains in earnest.

Fink has described the shift as an update to the plumbing of financial markets, comparing its potential to that of the internet in the mid-1990s. The comparison carries weight: BlackRock manages $14 trillion and already operates the world's largest tokenized fund. In his annual letter, Fink said tokenization has the potential to modernize the financial system by making assets easier to issue, trade, and hold, particularly through digital wallets.

Wells Fargo, the country's fourth-largest bank, said last week it would offer tokenized deposits to corporate and commercial clients this fall. JPMorgan and Citigroup already operate similar services, with JPMorgan's Kinexys network processing more than $7 billion a day and handling over $4 trillion since launch.

Citi Puts a Number on It

@Citi has gone further with a formal forecast. According to its new report, "Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain," the global market for tokenized securities currently stands at around $17 billion, but Citi anticipates that figure will climb rapidly, with a base case of $5.5 trillion and a range of $2.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion by 2030, depending on how quickly the market adopts tokenization solutions.

Citi expects that growth to happen in mainstream public markets such as U.S. stocks and government bonds, rather than private markets, assuming 10% of the U.S. Treasury bill market and 3% of the U.S. public stock market will be tokenized by 2030.

The infrastructure to support that scale is already taking shape. Major market infrastructures including DTCC, Nasdaq, and the NYSE's owner ICE are embedding tokenization into their core trading systems, while growing stablecoin use and clearer U.S. regulation are enabling instant, on-chain settlement. In early May, the DTCC announced it would start limited production trades of tokenized securities in July, with a broader platform launch set for October.

Citigroup notes that the companies running the world's stock markets are supportive of tokenization and are now building the technology directly into their trading systems. With institutions of that scale committing capital and infrastructure, the question for markets is no longer whether tokenization arrives, but how fast.

Sources:
Forbes: Why Tokenization, Otherwise Known As Wall Street's Great Rewiring, Finally Looks Real
The Defiant: Citi Projects $5.5T Tokenized Securities Market by 2030
CoinDesk: Citi Predicts Tokenized Securities Market Will Grow to $5.5 Trillion by 2030