What happened?
Joe Moglia, the former TD Ameritrade chair now at FG Nexus, predicted that every financial asset will be tokenized within five years and is actively moving his firm in that direction. Real‑world asset tokenization has already surged to roughly $34 billion, led by private credit, U.S. Treasuries, and tokenized gold that topped $3 billion. Ethereum currently dominates the space with about $12.1 billion in tokenized assets while other networks like Solana are seeing rapid revenue and tokenized stock growth.
Who does this affect?
Traditional finance players—banks, asset managers, custodians, and exchanges—face big changes as issuance, custody, and trading move on‑chain. Crypto platforms, blockchain developers, and DeFi services stand to gain as the infrastructure backbone, while retail and institutional investors get new on‑chain access to stocks, bonds, and commodities. Regulators and service providers will also be pulled in as rules, compliance, and settlement practices need to adapt to tokenized markets.
Why does this matter?
Market impact could be huge: tokenization can unlock new liquidity, enable on‑chain lending and trading, and shift capital away from traditional ETFs and intermediaries. Heavy concentration on a few chains like Ethereum creates network, fee and regulatory risks that could shape winners and losers and influence market structure. How quickly adoption spreads and whether infrastructure fragments will determine if tokenization disrupts markets in five years or evolves unevenly over a longer period.