Financial institutions are increasingly accelerating their migration toward an onchain future through targeted tokenization initiatives. According to industry leaders, these blockchain-based approaches provide access to entirely new markets while offering significant structural advantages over traditional investment products.
Matthew Horne, head of digital asset strategists at Fidelity Investments, highlighted this irreversible momentum during a high-profile panel discussion at the Longitude conference in Singapore on Thursday. The panel, which brought together prominent voices from traditional finance and the digital asset sector, focused on the structural transformation currently underway across global capital markets.
"In the last 18 months, if you look at the push by true institutions to move toward an onchain future, it’s really no going back," Horne stated during the discussion.
The sentiment reflects a broader industry-wide realization that distributed ledger technology is no longer an experimental frontier for major financial entities, but rather a foundational infrastructure for the next generation of financial products. US asset managers, in particular, face strong structural and commercial incentives to move traditional assets onchain. Horne explained that tokenization provides significantly better investor access, enabling institutions to efficiently reach new markets that were previously difficult or cost-prohibitive to serve through legacy clearing and settlement systems.
This institutional conviction is increasingly backed by hard market data. Demand for tokenized assets has surged notably, with total demand rising by 41% over a recent 30-day period. Concurrently, the number of unique holders of tokenized real-world assets topped 493,000 addresses, according to data from tracking platform RWA.xyz. This metric specifically measures the total number of blockchain addresses holding tokenized real-world assets, intentionally excluding stablecoins to provide a clearer picture of actual investment demand in tokenized securities, commodities, and other physical or financial instruments.
The panel discussion in Singapore featured a diverse lineup of industry experts, including Jihye Lee of the Wall Street Journal, Matthew Horne of Fidelity, Ka Yan Chan of UBS, Chongwu Du of Securitize, and Sidney Powell of Maple. Their dialogue underscored how traditional financial heavyweights are actively collaborating with digital native infrastructure providers to bridge the gap between legacy systems and public or permissioned blockchains.
Treasuries and Equities May Bring Billions Onchain With More US Tokenization Adoption
As the regulatory environment in the United States and other major jurisdictions gradually evolves, market participants are eyeing the integration of traditional portfolio staples—such as government treasuries and corporate equities—onto blockchain networks. Ka Yan Chan, head of digital assets business development at UBS, emphasized that these core asset classes have the potential to bring billions, and eventually trillions, of dollars onchain as adoption deepens.
"What would really drive the billions to the trillions is when market infrastructure players like the Fed or DTCC make the first move in transforming the custody layer to a tokenized platform," Chan noted during the panel session.
Chan added that broader industry players are well-positioned to "piggyback" on these foundational institutional initiatives by building the necessary distribution layers for tokenized assets, creating a collaborative ecosystem where traditional market utilities and innovative fintech firms operate in tandem.
Recent regulatory milestones in the United States suggest that this foundational shift in market infrastructure is already underway. In December 2025, the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued a crucial "no-action" letter to a subsidiary of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, commonly known as the DTCC. This regulatory clearance enabled the clearinghouse subsidiary to offer a new securities market tokenization service, paving the way for mainstream financial institutions to experiment with and deploy blockchain-based settlement mechanisms under established regulatory frameworks.
Furthermore, the regulatory landscape has seen incremental flexibility designed to test onchain mechanics. In September, the SEC approved a temporary exemption allowing for the limited trading of tokenized US stocks on certain compliant onchain venues. Building on this momentum, digital asset issuance and administration firm Securitize announced the launch of trading for tokenized shares representing a dozen of the most widely held US-traded equities, featuring proper security entitlements to ensure regulatory compliance and investor protection.
These regulatory developments have injected fresh momentum into the broader decentralized finance and tokenized asset ecosystems. More than $1.2 billion in new capital has moved onchain during a recent 30-day window, lifting the combined capital across stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets to over $323 billion, according to data compiled by OnchainBenchmark.
The rapid accumulation of capital underscores a growing appetite among institutional investors for high-yield, liquid, and transparent digital financial instruments. Looking further ahead, major banking institutions have projected immense growth for the sector. Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital asset research at Standard Chartered, published a forecast suggesting that tokenized real-world assets could surge to an astonishing $4 trillion by the end of 2028, driven by institutional demand, regulatory clarity, and the inherent efficiencies of distributed ledger technology.
