Real-World Tokenization Is Surging as TradFi Grows More Receptive to Blockchain

They say tokenization of RWA – a way of putting ownership of tangible assets such as stocks and bonds on the blockchain – offers the convenience of buying and selling these assets around the clock because the transactions do not involve traditional brokers.

“If you think about traditional corporate bond issuance, for example, there’s a lot of paperwork and tracking,” Barbosa told CoinDesk in an interview. “You’d have to have a bond certificate. When you tokenize these assets you can increase the usability of the assets because you can support automation with smart contracts platforms and put important information on these assets … where in the past maybe you had to go with a third party or a middleman.”

Barbosa, who has worked in the crypto space since 2017, said more companies are more receptive to blockchain-enabled “business models, despite the series of debacles that have stung the industry over the past year. Those “failures we’ve seen in the marketplace have nothing to do with the (blockchain) technology,” she said.

He noted that users can trade a fraction of a specific tokenized stock like Tesla (TSLA) that has been divided into smaller shares or units at lower cost, with the settlement completed in seconds. Orders in traditional markets usually take 48 to 72 hours for the actual stock to transfer from the liquidity provider to the bank or the platform, Ras told CoinDesk.

“Tether is like the fiat-pegged currency of the world’s reserve currency,” Ndinga told CoinDesk in an interview. “From a remittances perspective, people can access it on a global scale as long as they have the internet connection, like the same way they would send emails to another party.”

In February, Berlin-based crypto exchange Swarm launched tradable, tokenized U.S. stocks and bonds via its DeFi platform. “To date, traditional market participants have not had a comprehensive and regulatory-compliant solution for issuing and trading real world assets on-chain,” Swarm co-founder Timo Lehes said in a statement.