A Wall Street giant anticipates the advance of tokenization: the market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030

During the last week, Wells Fargo, the fourth largest bank in the U.S. with nearly $2.3 trillion in assets, announced that it will offer tokenized deposits to its corporate and institutional portfolio. What would have previously been interpreted as a simple pilot test of blockchain technology now reflects a defensive maneuver aimed at preserving competitiveness against the rest of the sector.

It is worth noting that JPMorgan and Citigroup already have similar services. JPMorgan's Kinexys network processes more than $7 billion daily and has managed over $4 trillion since its launch. Both banking entities, along with Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and more than a dozen large banks, are also participating in an initiative by The Clearing House, a bank-owned payment company similar to Zelle, which is developing a shared system to transfer tokenized deposits between institutions.

The market is moving in the same direction. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the entity responsible for processing and settling nearly $15 trillion every day in the U.S. stock market, executed its first real transactions using tokenized stocks in July, aiming to deploy the service definitively in October. Meanwhile, BlackRock, the leading global fund management firm, launched two tokenized vehicles backed by money market instruments this month.

Citi estimates that tokenized securities could reach nearly $5.5 trillion by 2030, while Boston Consulting Group and the digital securities exchange platform ADDX calculate a potential market of $16.1 trillion for illiquid tokenized assets. Both figures reflect the magnitude of the bet. Tokenization is beginning to consolidate in the real operations of Wall Street, shedding its label as merely a promotional concept within the crypto ecosystem.
Citi estimates that tokenized securities could reach nearly $5.5 trillion by 2030.

What is tokenization?
Tokenization is a mechanism that allows representing an asset, or a right over it, through a digital token within a blockchain, a digital ledger that remains immutable. That asset can be a stock, a Treasury bond, a money market fund, or a bank deposit.

Tokenization does not necessarily change the asset, but the way in which it is recorded who owns it and how that ownership is transferred. Instead of a traditional stock purchase involving various actors, such as the broker, the clearinghouse, and the bank, with blockchain, those transactions can be recorded in a shared and synchronized digital ledger, where parties can verify who owns each asset and how it was transferred.

It is important to highlight that this technology was used by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, to enable the functioning of the cryptocurrency.

In this way, efficiency leaps are achieved by eliminating intermediaries and intermediate stages. When the asset and associated funds are settled on interconnected platforms, the transaction is executed simultaneously: the buying party receives the title at the same moment the seller receives the money, reducing counterparty risk to zero during the process.{#p-1786450778419-142}

Around-the-clock settlement captures a significant portion of market attention.{#p-1786453315060-8665}
freepik.es

Around-the-clock settlement captures a significant portion of market attention. However, this scheme involves costs and operational demands. Transitioning to a real-time settlement model requires a higher volume of immediate liquidity: while the traditional system allows for rounding balances at the end of the day through netting, individual execution requires full funding for each transaction.{#p-1786450843832-93779}

Why is it gaining momentum now? {#p-1786451332496-50194}

Wall Street has been testing tokenization for years. Overstock.com, an online retailer that unexpectedly became a pioneer in cryptocurrencies, completed a tokenized bond issuance on the blockchain for $5 million in 2015.{#p-1786451339449-60631}

The first substantial transformation came with liquidity. Stablecoins, digital tokens designed to maintain their value at one dollar, have become a market of around $300 billion. Thus, they provided tokenized markets with both a means of payment and a broad user base that already held dollar tokens on blockchains.{#p-1786451384989-21486}

When interest rates rose, tokenized Treasury funds emerged as a logical alternative. This tool allowed investors to rotate their capital from stablecoins, which typically do not earn yields, into public securities with returns, avoiding the traditional banking circuit and without the need to transfer funds to a conventional brokerage account.{#p-1786451685616-88323}

Evolution of Tokenization: Driven by the liquidity of stablecoins and clearer regulatory frameworks, tokenization modernizes financial infrastructure.{#p-1786453477749-7721}
Image: Freepik

A Growing Trend {#p-1786453094379-18088}

The Genius Law reinforced this trend. The federal regulation, enacted in 2025, requires that regulated payment stablecoins maintain reserves of at least one dollar for each coin and prohibits their issuers from paying interest to holders.{#p-1786451723997-25366}

Therefore, stablecoin companies need large reserves of safe and liquid assets, while holders seeking to earn a return must turn to other products. Thus, the expansion of digital dollars has increased the demand for tokenized Treasury bonds.

The regulatory framework has also gained predictability. By the end of 2025, SEC technicians granted the green light to the Depository Trust Company (DTC) ---the custody arm of DTCC--- to execute a pilot tokenization plan with a duration of three years. The following month, three divisions of the SEC detailed the legal differences between tokens issued by companies, those backed by shares under custody, and synthetic products that simply replicate the price of an asset.{#p-1786451876133-77778}

Wells Fargo: Announced tokenized deposits for its corporate and institutional portfolio, reflecting a maneuver to maintain competitiveness.{#p-1786453431790-39904}
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In March, the commission approved Nasdaq's rules allowing the trading of eligible tokenized shares alongside their conventional counterparts during the DTC pilot program. Meanwhile, federal banking supervisors clarified that as long as a tokenized security guarantees identical legal rights to its paper or ordinary registered counterpart, financial entities will not be required to hold extra capital reserves solely for operating on blockchain.{#p-1786451927996-8127}

Thus, banks create tokenized deposits, asset managers issue tokenized investments, exchanges prepare their systems to trade them, and DTC develops the necessary infrastructure for their custody and settlement. The billionaire CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, described this change as a modernization of the financial markets' infrastructure and compared its potential to that of the internet in the mid-1990s. "Every stock, every bond, every fund, every asset can be tokenized," he stated.

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