Citrini sees a tokenization boom. The harder question is who profits

This is an excerpt from CoinDesk's new ‘Tokenization Weekly’ newsletter that will be launching soon. Sign-up details will be here when it goes live.

Crypto enthusiasts have spent years telling that finance – stocks, bonds and other financial assets – would eventually move onto blockchains.

Now, an influential research firm that Wall Street investors pay attention to has made the case for them.

Citrini Research, better known for its work on broader technology, AI and market trends than for cheerleading crypto, turned its attention last week to tokenization in a 79-page report titled Breaking the Wall.

The report itself isn't news anymore, but the argument behind it is worth sitting with because it marks how far the conversation has moved.

For years, crypto built increasingly sophisticated infrastructure for trading, lending and moving money, while most of the assets investors actually wanted to own — stocks, bonds, credit and commodities — stayed inside the traditional financial system. Now those assets are beginning to migrate onto the rails crypto spent more than a decade building.

“Blockchains have finally found their raison d’être.”

For better or worse, one of the oldest knocks on crypto and blockchains was that it looked like a solution in search of a problem.

There were decentralized exchanges, automated lending protocols, crypto wallets and increasingly elaborate financial plumbing, but if all of it was mainly being used to trade one cryptocurrency against other cryptocurrency, the obvious question remained: what was the infrastructure actually built for?

Tokenization may finally provide a convincing answer.

U.S. Treasuries, credit, stocks, funds and other assets are increasingly moving onchain, and once they are there, the point isn't simply that an investor can trade Nvidia at 2 a.m on a Sunday.

The more interesting argument Citrini made is that tokenization can make financial assets behave more like software: moving between applications, serving as collateral, being borrowed against or plugged into other financial products without each platform rebuilding custody and settlement from scratch.