Wouldn’t you hate it if a WhatsApp message arrived after two days because it had to first be verified, stamped and filtered through three different stages. I mean we expect communication to happen in real time. So why shouldn’t one have the same expectations from our financial markets?
In this day and age, exchanging one stock for another still traditionally means selling, waiting for settlement, and only then buying again. However, token shares may change that.
Coding direction
The token stock entered the mainstream conversation following SpaceX’s initial public offering, the largest public offering in history at $75 billion. In the days that followed, blockchain-based platforms began offering a token for SpaceX alongside other notable names like Nvidia, Google, and Strategy, indicating growing demand for blockchain-native access to traditional assets.
Meanwhile, Nasdaq has sought regulatory approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to facilitate trading of tokenized securities on its own exchange, underscoring that the shift is no longer limited to native cryptocurrency platforms. What has long been seen as an emerging concept is now increasingly part of the broader market infrastructure conversation.
A token stock is just a stock that lives on the blockchain. Same company, same value, same rights as any stock you buy through a broker. What changes is how it moves. They can be traded at any hour, settled in seconds, broken down into smaller pieces so more people can access them, and moved across borders without the many layers that traditional securities rely on.
While stocks still dominate the tokenization narrative, momentum is expanding across other asset classes, with private credit surpassing $10 billion on-chain, up from about $5 billion a year earlier, according to RWA.xyz. Real estate, commodities and structured debt are also gradually moving up the chain, reflecting early but growing institutional involvement in markets that have long been constrained by high entry thresholds and aging infrastructure.
Together, these asset classes represent hundreds of trillions of dollars in global value.
However, not all blockchains are designed for institutional settlement. Many prioritize open market activity, where fee volatility and variable settlement times are acceptable trade-offs.
What will the scope of this market trend be in the future?
However, regulated tokenization requires predictable fees, deterministic settlement, and banking-grade infrastructure, capabilities for which most public blockchains were not designed. For its part, the XDC Network focused on this infrastructure, enabling tokenization at the institutional level long before tokenized stocks gained mainstream attention.
XDC Network has processed more than $1.1 billion worth of token receivables, private credit, and commodities, reflecting years of institutional adoption. In Brazil, for example, Liqi Digital Assets reported R$1.2 billion (about US$230 million) in cumulative token credit operations by early 2026, including R$600 million (about US$115 million) settled in January and February alone.
According to Atul Khikade, co-founder of XDC Network:
Assets that were easy to transfer already dominated the tokenization conversation. The most difficult problem is the one that was not accessible from the beginning. The value of these markets is much greater, and the infrastructure gap is the only thing standing between here and there. We are at the beginning of the decade of true coding, not the end.
BCG and Ripple expect the tokenized asset market to reach $18.9 trillion by 2033. Standard Chartered expands that to $30 trillion by 2034 when cross-border credit is included. The distance between these numbers and today is almost entirely a matter of infrastructure. It’s a question of which networks can handle the scale, compliance requirements and institutional expectations of markets not yet on-chain.
The regulatory environment is moving to support it as well. Brazil, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have all established legal frameworks that give tokenized financial instruments official status. The US GENIUS Act, passed in July 2025, created a federal stablecoin payment infrastructure. The focus is no longer on whether tokenization will be allowed, but rather on how quickly it will be widely adopted.
The IPO gave crypto company SpaceX a moment everyone can point to. However, the infrastructure to make it work at scale was not built in the weeks following the headline.
It’s been built over years, in parts of the market that never made the news. This is what the next decade of funding will continue to be.
