фото показано с : cryptoslate.com

The following is a guest post and opinion from Laura Estefania, Founder and CEO of Conquista PR.

The past decade of digital assets has been shaped as much by debacle as by innovation. High-profile collapses, sensational headlines, and regulatory whiplash distorted public perception, leaving technologies capable of modernizing global finance viewed through a lens of suspicion.

Beneath that noise, however, tokenization has quietly crossed an irreversible threshold.

As recent analysis by Larry Fink and Rob Goldstein makes clear, tokenization is no longer an experiment. It is becoming part of the underlying infrastructure of financial markets. The constraint today is not technological maturity, it is perception.

Tokenization is edging closer to becoming a mainstream capital raising tool. The efficiency gains and benefits of broader access are simply too big to ignoreIssuers in growing economies have an unrivaled opportunity to boost market inclusion through blockchain-native capital raises.”

Perception in finance shapes real outcomes. It influences capital formation, informs regulatory posture, and determines whether institutions feel confident enough to integrate new systems.

The problem is not that tokenization lacks technical readiness. The problem is that it is still being judged through the legacy optics of past crypto excesses.

In finance, perception becomes a gating mechanism. It defines what decision-makers feel allowed to deploy.

Tokenization does not expand the regulatory perimeter or rewrite who may invest in which instruments. Securities laws, investor classifications, and jurisdictional restrictions remain firmly in place.

What changes is the infrastructure through which compliant participation is executed, monitored, and scaled.

Tokenization tends to improve:

Tokenization does not automatically change:

Fractional ownership is not a legal breakthrough. Corporate equity has always been divisible, and debt has long been issued in varied denominations. The limiting factor has been operational, not conceptual.

Traditional market plumbing makes granular participation inefficient due to:

By recording ownership as a verifiable digital entry that can move at the speed of information, tokenization removes friction. What was legally permissible but economically impractical becomes viable at scale.

Major asset managers are already building regulated tokenized products and settlement rails, including initiatives tied to BlackRock and Franklin Templeton.

None of this is speculative or ideological. It is infrastructure improvement.

Yet tokenization is still evaluated through the afterimage of prior market failures, where retail speculation and platform collapses dominated the public story. That misalignment risks slowing adoption precisely where tokenization offers measurable benefits: lower costs, faster settlement, and greater transparency.

The consequence is simple: institutions hesitate, even when the technology is ready and the use case is already regulated.

Outside the West, tokenization is often less a theory and more a practical response to structural friction. In many emerging markets, the challenge is not replacing a highly efficient banking system, it is compensating for one that can be fragmented, slow, and expensive to access.

Common pain points include:

Tokenization does not remove regulatory constraints, but it can reduce operational frictions that inflate the effective cost of capital. Faster settlement, transparent ownership records, and programmable compliance reduce reliance on intermediaries, allowing global liquidity to reach local projects with fewer layers of cost and delay.

This dynamic is discussed in broader regional adoption research, including the Milken Institute’s coverage of Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital asset landscape here.

In the U.S. and Europe, regulatory attention remains heavily oriented toward classification and containment, even as stablecoins and tokenized government securities already move significant value across borders. Institutions run pilots, then pause. Not because the tech fails, but because reputational risk and public perception still blur “market infrastructure” with “speculative activity.”

Citi, for example, projects that tokenization of financial and real-world assets in private markets alone could reach the trillions by 2030. Yet many institutions still treat tokenization as optional experimentation rather than inevitable modernization.

This is not merely a communication problem. It is a competitive one. Jurisdictions that assess tokenization through efficiency, risk management, and capital flow optimization are pulling ahead, while others preserve complexity the rest of the world is actively designing around.

For a discussion of how major institutions approach on-chain experimentation, see CryptoSlate’s coverage here.

Tokenization does not need evangelism. It needs comprehension, and regulators willing to judge financial infrastructure by outcomes rather than optics.

Under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), Europe has prioritized standardization. MiCA does not regulate tokenized securities, those remain governed by existing capital-markets law. Instead, it sets rules for crypto-assets that fall outside traditional financial regulation, including governance, disclosure, and reserve management for certain on-chain settlement instruments.

That clarity improves institutional readability, which is a prerequisite for banks, asset managers, and custodians to engage at scale (MiCA text and implementing materials can be accessed via EUR-Lex).

Rather than a single pan-regional framework, Gulf jurisdictions have emphasized structured rollout: sandboxes, phased licensing, and regulator-led pilots that move tokenized deposits, funds, and payment instruments from proof-of-concept to production.

You can see examples of this regulatory posture through bodies such as ADGM and the UAE Securities and Commodities Authority.

Different strategies, same logic:

Emmanuel Givanakis, CEO of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) at Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) in October 2025 said:

The FSRA continues to enhance its digital asset regulatory framework to remain forward-looking and responsive to the next wave of financial innovation, including tokenization, DeFi and AI-driven market participation. Our approach balances innovation with strong governance, risk-based supervision, and alignment with global standards. We are committed to enabling digital asset firms to scale within a well-regulated international financial centre that prioritises transparency, resilience, and long-term stability.

Tokenization becomes operationally powerful because it replaces fragmented legacy workflows with a single programmable ledger.

In practice, this can mean:

What was always legally possible but operationally inefficient becomes feasible at scale.

Finance is being rewired in parallel across regions that rarely move in sync. The technology is mature, demand is visible, and regulatory pathways are no longer hypothetical.

What has changed most decisively is not the code, but the context in which it is now understood. Tokenization is moving out of yesterday’s headlines and into the domain of policy, prudential supervision, and institutional balance sheets.

Once tokenization is understood as infrastructure, the burden of proof reverses. The question becomes not whether it belongs in the financial system, but how efficiently it can be deployed, supervised, and scaled.

If you only read one section, read this:

Tokenization’s formative debate is ending. What follows is an execution phase, defined less by ideology and more by governance, interoperability, and speed. The markets that recognize this earliest will not merely adopt tokenization, they will help define how global finance operates in its next iteration.

The post From marginal experiment to global market infrastructure: Tokenization is rewriting finance appeared first on CryptoSlate.

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