where tokenization actually lands in 2030

This edition explores what the 2030 tokenization forecasts contain once you open them, why they disagree so widely, and what changed inside them.

Tokenized assets on public blockchains are worth about $33.5 billion today, leaving stablecoins aside. Every major research house expects that to reach the trillions by 2030. None of them agree on how many trillions, and the answers vary by a factor of fifteen.

Here are all the projections on one chart:

a16z is right about a good part of that gap. McKinsey counts bonds, loans, funds and equities. Standard Chartered adds commodities and trade finance. BCG and Ripple include deposits and stablecoins. The forecasts are answering different questions, and much of the disagreement disappears once you check what each one is counting.

Citi sits near the bottom of that chart. Ronit Ghose leads Future of Finance at Citi Institute, and his team published the report Tokenization 2030 in June of this year.

Sri Misra asked him on un# why the range is so wide.

Ghose said the width of the range is the point: it tells you how early the market is, and the report opens by quoting a contributor who puts tokenization at one and a half on a scale of ten on the journey to tokenized markets.

The report gives three cases rather than a single figure. Around $2.7 trillion if adoption stays slow, $5.5 trillion as the base case, $8.2 trillion if things move quickly.

In all three cases, public securities account for almost the entire total. Private credit, private equity and real estate funds show up as thin bands at the top of each bar, and together they come to less than a tenth of the base case.

The March 2023 forecast had the opposite shape. Real estate was the second largest line in the model. Private equity and venture capital sat above listed securities.

The bank expected tokenization in private markets to grow eightyfold by 2030, and the report's central argument was that this technology would reach assets nobody could trade.

Between the two forecasts, the total moved by about a trillion dollars. What sits underneath it changed almost entirely.

There is a smaller thing in the same table. The forecast assumes 10% of the US Treasury bill market gets tokenized by 2030 and 5% of money market funds, and a money market fund holds mostly Treasury bills.

The gap between those two rates is the fund wrapper. Banks and brokers already clear, price and post a Treasury bill as collateral every working day, so issuing one onchain changes where it settles and little else.

The same paper inside a fund brings a transfer agent, a daily NAV, redemption rules, and a regulator that has watched money funds closely since the liquidity stress of 2020. The penetration rates track how much existing infrastructure each instrument carries with it.

The original promise was fractional property. An apartment block split into tokens, an owner in one country and a buyer in another. Tokenized real estate today is worth roughly $165 million worldwide, against a fund market measured in trillions.

Ghose explained why on the un# podcast behind this issue.

“The reason some assets are illiquid is quite fundamental and structural, and just putting it on a blockchain doesn't change that.“

He used venture capital as the example. The legal structures around a venture stake vary by country, the interests are not fungible, and each one is negotiated separately. A blockchain does not change any of that. What most platforms sell is a representation of the equity rather than the equity itself, which is the substance of the current argument about SPVs holding stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI.

Our founder, Sri Misra, made the same point on the Asia Tech Podcast in August 2025, a year before the forecast was rewritten. Real estate, he said, is one of the last things that gets onchain, because of the legal framework and the contractual work around it.

Hamilton Lane, KKR and Apollo have all run tokenized feeder funds for qualified wealth clients. Those funds remain a very small share of what the three firms manage.

That leaves a forecast built on assets that already work. A US listed equity trades in size all day, on a settlement system that rarely fails. So it is fair to ask what tokenizing it buys.

The answer is meant to be atomic settlement. The share and the cash move in the same instant, or neither moves. There is no gap between instruction and payment, so no counterparty risk sits in that gap and no capital is held against it.

This only works if both legs are on the same network. Earlier attempts issued the asset onchain and settled the cash through the old rails, which removed most of the benefit.

The reason it stays unsolved has more to do with competition than with engineering. A bank that wants to settle onchain has to choose a network, and it can either join one that exists or build its own.

Joining a competitor's means relying on that competitor for uptime, for the rulebook, and for deciding who else gets admitted. Most banks built their own. By May 2025, financial firms were running at least 72 separate ledgers between them, and they do not connect.

Three designs are in use. Ethereum and Solana are open to anyone. Hyperledger Fabric and R3 Corda are closed networks with controlled membership. Canton and Provenance sit between the two, with open infrastructure and a gate on access. Each answers a different question about who a bank wants to trade with, which is why the industry has not converged on one.

Two other pieces are missing. Stablecoins today have to be funded before a trade rather than during it, which uses up the liquidity efficiency the model is supposed to deliver. And no identity standard lets a regulated firm verify who is on the other side of a trade to the standard its own obligations require. Chris Rayner-Cook at Brevan Howard Digital calls that the biggest bottleneck of the lot.

BlackRock issued its tokenized Treasury fund on Ethereum and now runs it across several chains. It holds around $2.5 billion.

Franklin Templeton started its onchain government money fund on Stellar and later extended it to Ethereum.

Larry Fink and Rob Goldstein have compared where tokenization stands to the internet in 1996.

The exchanges have moved as well, and they have made different bets.

DTCC was authorised in December 2025 to tokenize assets it already holds in custody, and starts a three-year pilot in late 2026 covering stocks, ETFs and Treasuries, with existing legal ownership left in place.

Nasdaq cleared the SEC in March 2026 and is fitting tokenization into the market structure that already exists, keeping the post-trade layer intact.

NYSE announced a platform in January 2026 for delivery by late 2026, with continuous trading, near-instant settlement, stablecoin funding, and the option to run alongside or outside traditional clearing.

Nasdaq's design assumes clearing survives the transition. NYSE's leaves room to work without it.

None of these firms is digital-asset native, every date falls inside the next eighteen months, and the market they are building for is worth about $33.5 billion.

An industry survey has asked market participants what they expect from all this, three years running, most recently across 537 asset managers, broker-dealers, banks, institutional investors and custodians.

The share expecting ledger-based market to cut post-trade costs has risen every year and now sits above half.Expectations for liquidity and asset mobility have risen with it. The share expecting new product revenue has fallen by about a third, and expectations for market turnover have fallen further.

Somewhere around 2024, the industry stopped describing tokenization as a growth opportunity and started funding it as a cost programme. That is a more durable reason to build, because the saving does not depend on a client asking for anything.

> in practice

Once both legs of a trade sit onchain, the question stops being what to tokenize and becomes when each holding should be collateral, yield, or cash.

aarnâ is built for that decision: it allocates treasury capital under enforceable rules, with concentration limits, liquidity-aware sizing, and every action logged onchain. More at aarna.ai.

DTCC's pilot begins late 2026. NYSE's platform is due late 2026. Nasdaq is cleared and waiting. If those three land, the forecasts stop being an argument about definitions and become an argument about numbers.

The projections can be prudent, plausible, or positive, and the numbers can show vast variance. But amid that variance, one thing remains definite: growth.

The next era of markets is tokenized.

This issue grew out of a conversation with Ronit Ghose, Global Head of Future of Finance at Citi Institute, on tokenized assets, their projections and institutional adoption of technology. The full episode is on Unhashed.

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