Every month, we’re diving into the state of tokenization: the biggest updates on tokenization being tokenized, what’s going onchain and offchain, who’s integrating with who and more.
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BlackRock’s Digital Assets Director: All assets will go onchain
When BlackRock, the biggest asset management firm in the world, entered the digital assets space a few years ago, many in the industry were ecstatic. Fast forward to today, and outside of announcements and partnerships, the firm’s strategy is a bit opaque.
So we decided to get to the bottom of it with Max Stein, a director on the Digital Assets team at BlackRock, on the firm’s first, and exclusive, podcast interview. Speaking on Talking Tokens, Stein unpacked how the world's largest asset manager is translating digital assets into real products and where tokenization is heading next. He offers an inside look at the firm's playbook, from the launch of the BUIDL fund to its expanding role in the stablecoin ecosystem.
Despite running one of the most influential digital asset programs on Wall Street, Stein emphasized that BlackRock's digital asset team is intentionally small, and leans on deep cross-functional partnerships rather than a siloed crypto unit.
"In order to bring our products to market, we work with a whole host of different teams," Stein said, citing collaborations with teams managing cash, private credit, ETF structuring, market structure, policy, and law.
Externally, BlackRock has aligned itself with a tight set of strategic partners. The firm serves as the primary non-bank reserve manager for Circle, managing a significant portion of USDC reserves. As for tokenization, BlackRock partnered with Securitize to launch BUIDL, its tokenized money market fund.
BUIDL is one of the biggest successes produced by BlackRock’s Digital Assets team, with a valuation of more than $2.5 billion. While Stein maintains that the firm’s thesis with BUIDL has largely been validated, he says the journey here is just beginning. The firm’s next big focus is on tokenizing cash.
"I know it's a boring answer, but at this stage, I think the market is still very small,” Stein said. “The long tail really hasn't been established yet, and the market has a lot more room to run.”
In the long run, Stein sees stablecoins, tokenized and registered money market funds, tokenized treasuries, and tokenized deposits converging into a single programmable cash layer. This layer, he thinks, will open the door to private credit, collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), equities, and ETFs migrating onchain, a move that could incentivize other financial institutions to tokenize their products.
Looking back at BlackRock’s Digital Asset performance so far, Stein said the collapse of crypto exchange FTX was actually a net positive for BlackRock’s tokenization efforts.
"After FTX happened, our work on tokenization accelerated,” he said. “It [highlighted] why we need tokenization and why we need the blockchain."
That conviction now extends to public networks, where he thinks the institutional posture has fundamentally shifted. "Most people flipped over the last few years to get more comfortable with public [chains]. We, of course, did [the same] when launching our products on public networks,” Stein said.
Stein expects tokenization to eventually touch nearly every asset class, but only if the crypto-native market proves its utility for traditional players.
"Eventually, I do think all assets will go onchain," he said. "But we first need to get the flywheel moving. We need to grow the market — start with the assets people actually will care about in the short run,” he said. “Once we really prove that utility with a small set of people, then the custodians can support it, and more and more assets can start to find product-market fit."
RWA distributed asset value: $30.13B (+5.41%)
Number of RWA holders: 739K (+3.4%)
Transfer volume: $11.33B (+73.24%)
Total stablecoin value: $298.6B (-0.18%)
Tokenized treasuries total value: $15.07B (+12.69%)
Tokenized private credit (active loans value): $5.01B (-17.54%)
The metrics are accurate at the time of publication and powered by RWA.xyz. The percentage change is over a 30-day period.
What Caught Our Eye This Month
Securitize has integrated with TRON to offer tokenized assets and funds on the blockchain. Tron has historically been one of the largest blockchains in terms of stablecoins, currently boasting a stablecoin market cap of $85.05 billion, but has lagged other major chains in terms of RWA volume. The partnership makes Securitize the first RWA issuer to expand operations to Tron.
HSBC has completed a pilot simulating the issuance, transfer and atomic settlement of its Tokenised Deposit Service (TDS) on the Canton Network. During this simulation, HSBC simulated the transfer and atomic settlement of tokenized deposits against USD and foreign stablecoins. For Canton, having HSBC onboard is a major unlock and brings further credibility to the chain, while for HSBC, the move increases the interoperability of its tokenized deposits and allows them to settle against any other asset on Canton.
Ondo Finance partnered with Deutche Börse Group (DBG), one of Germany’s largest exchanges by revenue, to release tokenized stocks. Included in the partnership was Clearstream, a DBG subsidiary which will handle custody, settlement, and collateralization of the tokenized assets, and 360X, another DBG subsidiary which will be the main trading venue. For Ondo, which has primarily been focused on US markets until this point, this is a major expansion into Europe and signals a desire for broader exposure globally.
Additional RWA & Tokenization Developments
Securitize and Computershare have announced an agreement to allow U.S.-listed companies to issue equity securities in tokenized form via Issuer-Sponsored Tokens (ISTs). Crucially, issuers can add ISTs alongside traditional shares without altering their capital structure, preserving the direct issuer-shareholder relationship. The move creates a compliant, mainstream pathway for public company shares to exist onchain.
The IMF has warned that tokenized finance could amplify market crises by eliminating the settlement buffers regulators rely on to intervene. The Fund calls for central bank-anchored settlement, legal clarity, and smart contract override mechanisms.
Bridgetower has integrated Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, Proof of Reserve, and NAVLink, to tokenize its $11 billion DOM X Arizona Copper-Gold Project. This includes verification, valuation updates, compliance logic, and settlement of tokenized securities.
Bitget launched IPO Prime, a platform that uses Solana to offer tokenized exposure to private companies before they go public, with SpaceX as its first listing.
Hashgraph and The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative partnered to create a shared property risk portal that tokenizes commercial and residential property using Hedera. The portal keeps sensitive underwriting data on HashSphere, Hashgraph's private permissioned ledger. This aggregates all data needed by carriers, brokers, and reinsurers into one place to condense workload.
OCBC and Lion Global Investors have launched the OCBC-LionGlobal Physical Gold Fund Token, a tokenized gold fund issued on Ethereum and Solana aimed at the Southeast Asian market.
Aurise Foundation launched XAUE, a yield-bearing gold token designed to act as a treasury layer for Tether Gold. Aurelion and Antalpha have committed approximately $76M of liquidity to the token.
Ondo has launched Ondo Perps, a perpetual futures trading platform for tokenized securities and commodities.
Term of the month: Wrapped Token
Definition: A digital asset that represents another asset at a 1:1 ratio so the latter can be used in environments that wouldn't otherwise support it. This is most commonly done for assets moving between two blockchains with different token standards, for example Ethereum, which uses a different token standard than Solana, making assets on Ethereum incompatible with applications built on Solana.
Used in a sentence: Since bitcoin uses a different token standard than Ethereum, an investor needs to create a wrapped token in order to trade it on the network.
What We’re Listening To This Month
Nikhil Chandhok, chief product and technology officer of Circle, spoke on the Tokenized podcast about how the rise of AI agents is driving a shift toward an "agentic economy," where stablecoins like USDC enable frictionless machine-to-machine micropayments that replace ad-supported and subscription models
Ayyan Rahman, co-founder and chief growth officer at OnRe, spoke on the Talking Tokens podcast about why he believes many RWAs function more like repackaged traditional finance than truly composable onchain assets
Ashley Ebersole, co-founder and chief legal officer at TX, spoke on The Market Runup about how tokenized real-world assets can become a multi-trillion dollar market, and how onchain assets enable global, fractional investing
This is the State of Tokenization. April Edition.
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This information is for entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research.
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