There were decentralized exchanges, automated lending protocols, crypto wallets and increasingly elaborate financial plumbing, but if all of it was mainly being used to trade one cryptocurrency against other cryptocurrency, the obvious question remained: what was the infrastructure actually built for?
Tokenization may finally provide a convincing answer.
U.S. Treasuries, credit, stocks, funds and other assets are increasingly moving onchain, and once they are there, the point isn’t simply that an investor can trade Nvidia at 2 a.m on a Sunday.
The more interesting argument Citrini made is that tokenization can make financial assets behave more like software: moving between applications, serving as collateral, being borrowed against or plugged into other financial products without each platform rebuilding custody and settlement from scratch.
Those pieces are also starting to come together. Stablecoins put cash onchain. Wallets, exchanges and DeFi protocols have matured. Retail-facing trading platforms like Robinhood (HOOD), Coinbase (COIN) and others bring distribution. And regulators – in the U.S. and around the globe – are beginning to give tokenized securities a clearer path into markets.
Why this is a big deal
Citrini isn’t discovering tokenization. Crypto-native investors have talked about real-world assets (RWA) for years.
What’s different is seeing a widely followed research shop outside the crypto bubble translate the thesis into the language that large investors care about most: where do you actually make money?
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