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Senior executives at a Hong Kong conference said tokenized representations of traditional assets are moving from pilots toward production use among large financial firms, anchored by cash‑like instruments, treasuries and stablecoin settlement. Panelists warned that technical limits (throughput, latency, finality and transaction‑ordering) and emerging concentration among middleware and custody providers must be addressed—through atomic delivery‑versus‑payment, programmable compliance and interoperable custody—before meaningful retail uptake follows.
Robinhood opened a public developer testnet for an Arbitrum-derived layer‑2, Robinhood Chain, to create an onchain rail for tokenized securities and crypto-native financial products, with a mainnet planned later this year and early partner integrations underway. The move ties into Robinhood’s longer-term effort to shorten settlement windows—a lesson drawn from its 2021 liquidity stress—and comes as regulators and market participants press for harmonized rules to reconcile tokenized mechanics with securities law.
The first wave of tokenization largely digitized existing processes; the next phase must rebuild issuance, settlement and compliance as native, programmable layers so asset tokens can act as interoperable building blocks in digital‑money rails. That transition depends on solving throughput, latency/finality and transaction‑ordering limits, while regulatory choices and middleware concentration will shape whether markets centralize on platform‑led rails or remain open and composable.
Deutsche Börse’s 360T platform onboarded a Kraken‑backed tokenized equity product on Feb. 9, 2026, signaling a concrete step to fold ledgered shares into regulated trading rails. Broader market and regulatory signals — on‑chain tokenized equities nearing $1bn, sharp year‑over‑year growth and evolving EU/US guidance — are accelerating hybrid, custody‑integrated approaches even as technical and custody questions persist.
Incumbent banks are moving to tokenized bank deposits — on-chain representations of existing liabilities — to capture blockchain settlement efficiencies while keeping deposit risk and supervision inside regulated balance sheets. That shift responds to modelling showing stablecoins can erode domestic deposits and is constrained by legal recognition, identity/compliance automation and core infrastructure limits such as throughput, finality and transaction-ordering risks.
As institutions pilot tokenized real‑world assets, a core infrastructure choice is emerging: keep settlement and sequencing inside permissioned, operator-controlled rails or shift compliance to application layers while using public rollups that inherit Ethereum’s base‑layer security. The former risks recreating incumbent intermediaries, concentration and regulatory complexity; the latter can preserve openness but requires solving throughput, latency, finality and transaction‑ordering limits that currently drive middleware and sequencing centralization.
At Consensus Hong Kong, executives from Ondo Finance and Securitize said tokenization will scale only when tokens become usable plumbing for regulated markets — not when issuance is driven by hype. They pointed to programmable compliance, distribution through regulated channels, and the ability to redeploy tokens as collateral (including Ondo’s use of tokenized equities as margin) as the levers that will convert interest into institutional capital.
Zeta Network Group said it is evaluating tokenizing real-world assets to complement its bitcoin-centric treasury and mining operations. The company frames this as a way to add yield stability and duration management while staying aligned with public-company governance and regulatory requirements.