During the recent Consensus conference held in Hong Kong, various digital asset specialists agreed that, although the technology has captured global attention, the utility of tokenization is just beginning its journey. Graham Ferguson, head of ecosystem at Securitize, stressed the urgent need to connect market expectations with real operational benefits for traditional financial institutions.
Min Lin, managing director of global expansion at Ondo, highlighted that traditional markets represent a monumental opportunity, with the US Treasury market valued at 29 trillion dollars. Despite these astronomical figures, experts warn that the sector must demonstrate tangible use cases that justify the massive migration of conventional assets toward distributed ledger networks and protocols.
Issuance strategies and on-chain regulatory compliance
Regarding technical design, leading companies are adopting different approaches to face the current interoperability and regulatory challenges in the market. While Ondo bets on a “wrapper” model to scale quickly, Securitize prefers the native issuance of regulated securities on the blockchain, ensuring that each asset strictly complies with the legal standards of each jurisdiction and region.
Ferguson explained that his firm’s approach consists of advancing in lockstep with regulators, acting as authorized transfer agents and broker-dealers globally. However, integrating these assets into decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols presents technical difficulties, especially due to the need to track the beneficial owner at all times, an indispensable requirement for modern regulatory compliance today.
On the other hand, Ondo has managed to expand its offering to thousands of products through its agile scalability model. By tokenizing stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), they have allowed these assets to be used directly as collateral in perpetual markets, eliminating the exclusive dependence on stablecoins for collateral, which represents a significant advance in capital efficiency.
Where is the real-world asset market headed?
Likewise, the distinction between permissioned and permissionless protocols has become crucial for the global distribution of these financial instruments. By allowing certain products to operate freely between peers after a compliance period, liquidity within the DeFi ecosystem is fostered, allowing investors outside the United States to access markets that were previously restrictive and inefficient for many.
Therefore, the industry faces the challenge of unifying media hype with the technical infrastructure necessary for massive and secure adoption. Having demonstrated that the utility of tokenization improves settlement and transparency, the next step is to integrate these solutions into the heart of the traditional financial system, avoiding the creation of isolated compliance islands without connection.
However, the success of this technological cycle will depend on the regulatory clarity that authorities, such as the SEC, can provide in the coming months. As a result, specialists insist that one should not jump the gun, but rather build solid foundations that allow the digital representation of assets to be the norm and not the exception within the global economy.
Finally, the ability to scale from hundreds to thousands of tokenized assets will set the pace of the industry during this year 2026. In this way, the convergence between distributed ledger technology and traditional capital markets promises to transform the global financial infrastructure, provided that the creation of real value is prioritized over the simple technological speculation currently dominating.
