Wall Street Is Embracing a New Way to Own Stocks, Bonds, and Real Estate That Most Haven’t Heard Of

The tokenization concept that crypto fans have hyped for years is finally getting serious money behind it. At its core, it’s the process of turning real-world assets — like stocks or real estate — into crypto-like tokens that can trade around the clock, in tiny fractions. The technology promises to break down barriers that have historically favored wealthy investors while making markets more accessible to everyday traders.

Digital receipts with superpowers: Unlike traditional markets that shut down after hours, take days to settle trades, and limit access with high minimums, tokenized markets run on different rails. Assets can move instantly, be split into small pieces, and trade without banks or brokers. This makes it easier to access assets like dollars, real estate, or government bonds through a single interface. Each version looks different — but they all aim to remove friction, lower costs, and give more people a way in. And while the idea sounds new, it’s been around in different forms for years:

• Stablecoins, which represent tokenized versions of the US dollar, have already reached a $256B market cap and could hit $2T by 2028, according to Standard Chartered projections.
• Similarly, tokenized real estate allows you to buy and trade fractions of property digitally, and is set to soar from under $300B in 2024 to $4T by 2035, per Deloitte.

Everyone Wants a Slice of the Token Pie

Like most crypto innovations, tokenized assets come with fine print. They often lack voting rights or dividends, and ownership depends entirely on contract terms. Still, major institutions like BlackRockBLK

and Franklin TempletonBEN

have embraced the trend by offering tokenized money market funds. At the same time, platforms like RobinhoodHOOD

and CoinbaseCOIN

have been petitioning for tokenized stock trading across international markets, pushing the space further into the mainstream. This token FOMO has Wall Street racing to keep up:

• Yesterday, Goldman SachsGS
  and Bank of New York MellonBK
  announced a partnership that would let institutions purchase tokenized money market funds.
• They’re targeting the $7.1T money market industry, with BlackRock, FidelityFNF
  , and Federated HermesFHI
  already signed on.

Risky business: The Trump administration’s crypto-friendly stance has accelerated the market’s development, with the recently signed GENIUS Act set to boost even more traction. However, concerns are mounting as American University’s Hilary Allen believes the trend resembles pre-SEC market conditions from the 1920s, raising fears about weakened investor protections. Citadel Securities warned the SEC that tokenization could fragment liquidity and create uneven playing fields, noting it might “siphon liquidity away” from traditional markets and form trading pools that institutions can’t access due to compliance restrictions.