Brickken survey finds issuers prioritize fundraising over secondary liquidity
What the survey reveals
A targeted fourth‑quarter poll of issuers conducted by Brickken indicates tokenized projects are being driven primarily by fundraising goals and issuance efficiency, not by plans to instantly create active secondary markets. A clear plurality of respondents prioritized improved capital access and streamlined issuance processes over immediate tradability.
Most respondents reported live tokenized offerings; smaller cohorts remain in development or planning stages. That operational skew places engineering, legal frameworks and compliance design at the center of product roadmaps as teams prioritize a robust issuance foundation before pursuing high‑frequency trading activity.
Regulatory obstacles are widely reported and shape roll‑out timetables. Issuers describe compliance as an integral product design constraint rather than a post‑launch checklist — a stance that slows some launches but also tends to elevate the standard of assets entering token markets.
Interviewees see market‑structure advances — exchange pilots, ledgered settlement experiments and proposals for extended trading windows — as complementary to issuance work rather than immediate solutions. Several respondents framed liquidity as a dependent variable that will follow once standardized, regulated supply and custody models are in place.
Wider market context
Industry developments outside the survey mirror that staged view. Coalitions of market operators and exchange pilots in hubs such as Singapore and Europe are moving to prove continuous, auditable liquidity by focusing on practical enablers: atomic on‑chain delivery‑versus‑payment (DvP), transaction‑level programmable compliance, and modular custody‑clearing‑execution stacks. Those efforts aim to collapse reconciliation windows and let tokens plug directly into regulated workflows.
Yet technical constraints remain binding. Respondents and market observers point to throughput, predictable latency/finality and transaction‑ordering resilience as unresolved challenges that currently limit how readily tokenized assets can support professional market‑making. Middleware and well‑capitalized firms are already building sequencing, custody and settlement tooling to bridge those gaps — a dynamic that can speed adoption but also concentrate execution advantages.
The macro picture includes measurable early growth in tokenized equities and RWA inventories, and regulators in parts of Europe have introduced staged frameworks that give institutions clearer authorization paths. Issuers in the Brickken sample said such legal clarity and exchange‑level pilots would materially accelerate their plans to enable secondary markets, reinforcing the survey’s central finding: issuance quality and compliance alignment come first; secondary‑market depth follows.
Asset mix and issuer profile
Tokenized assets in the survey extend beyond property: equity‑style instruments, intellectual‑property and entertainment assets are well represented. Issuers come from platforms, entertainment firms, private‑credit managers and niche sectors, suggesting the token model is branching across industries and use cases.
Practitioners in the report describe tokenization as an infrastructure problem — translating legal and servicing standards into programmable workflows that protect investors and enable eventual interoperability. That framing keeps issuance mechanics, custody models and compliance primitives at the center of where future market value is captured.
- Diverse sectors: technology platforms, entertainment, private credit and renewable projects are on the tokenization roadmap.
- Issuance over trading: many issuers treat liquidity as an eventual, scalable outcome rather than an immediate necessity.
Taken together, the data sketch a staged market: issuers are building stronger, compliance‑aligned issuance now and expect secondary market depth to expand as infrastructure, exchange pilots and regulatory clarity converge. In short: build institutional‑grade foundations today; expect tradability to scale in coordinated waves.
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