Institutional Views on Tokenization: Three Consensuses and Two Disputes Emerge at the Solana Capital Forum

On October 6, the day before the opening of TOKEN2049, the Solana Foundation hosted the Solana Capital Forum in Singapore. This invite-only forum brought together asset allocators, with participants including DTCC, CME Group, Morgan Stanley, Invesco, Fidelity, and HSBC. The entire afternoon’s discussions centered almost exclusively on tokenization.

Scale is no longer hypothetical. According to data released by the Solana Foundation at the end of August, the value of RWA (real-world assets) on the Solana blockchain has exceeded $4 billion since 2026, and Solana accounts for more than half of the global tokenized stock trading volume.

Image from: rwa.xyz

Notably, unlike last year when discussions were still at the pilot stage, this time no one on stage questioned the necessity of tokenization; the focus of debate has shifted to issues after implementation: once assets are on-chain, who will use them, what will they be used for, and how can one exit if problems arise. One panel, moderated by Cheryl Chan, Director of Strategic Expansion at Kamino, directly incorporated this question into its title: “Tokenized. Now What?”

Based on the on-site discussions, institutions have reached consensus on three issues but still have significant differences on two others.

Some issuers still view tokenization as merely a legal framework: once assets are on-chain, buyers will naturally follow. However, current industry experience does not support this assumption. Passing eligibility checks is only the first step; the real work comes afterward: integrating with on-chain applications, establishing secondary market liquidity, and ensuring there are buyers to absorb positions during liquidations in lending markets.

What attracts traditional users is never the technology itself. Corporate treasury departments are a prime example. After speaking with 25 treasury leaders at Fortune 100 companies, Superstate found that this group has limited interest in stablecoins and DeFi, but is deeply concerned about settlement windows: banks require orders to be placed by 2 p.m., and billion-dollar payments made on Friday evening sit idle until Monday, creating a real burden on balance sheets. Tokenized assets that support 24/7 settlement directly fill this gap. Treasury teams rarely ask which blockchain a product runs on, or even whether it’s tokenized—they only care whether settlement is instant and funds are available on demand.

Asset management products face the same fundamental question. For traditional clients to switch to tokenized versions, there must be a concrete reason: faster settlement, lower costs, or functionality impossible with traditional versions. Crypto ETPs (exchange-traded products) precisely illustrate the limitations of the old model. Packaging new technology within old delivery methods works on wealth management platforms but does not alter how the underlying assets operate. The harder question lies deeper within the asset lifecycle: Can fundraising itself be conducted in a tokenized form? And how are tokenized private shares settled once the company goes public?

Overall, technical issues on the issuance side have been largely resolved, but putting assets on-chain does not automatically attract buyers; tokenized assets need specific use cases to grow.

If there’s one most certain use case for tokenized assets today, it’s collateral.

Demand often emerges at the boundaries of traditional rules. Anchorage Digital heard exactly this from Japanese clients: in Japan, U.S. securities cannot be used as collateral, so a tokenized version that can serve as collateral holds more value for customers than any improvement in the distribution process. Once distribution issues are resolved, composability and practical utility become the core drivers of tokenization.

Market infrastructure is also evolving in the same direction. CME Group and DTCC have completed a pilot demonstrating that tokenized Treasuries can serve as margin at CME. While crypto futures now enable 24/7 trading, value transfer remains unavailable over weekends; the next step is upgrading market structure to accept digital versions of existing collateral, such as tokenized money market funds and even stablecoins. Regulators are following suit—the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has already issued a consultation on using tokenized gold as collateral.

However, not all assets are suitable as collateral on-chain. In DeFi, borrowers who use tokenized assets as collateral to borrow stablecoins and then repurchase the same asset are effectively in a subordinate position: if the asset’s returns fluctuate and its net value declines, liquidation may be triggered—and such assets often lack willing liquidators. U.S. Treasuries, on the other hand, highlight an economic issue:循环借贷 with U.S. Treasuries assumes someone is willing to lend at a cost lower than the Treasury’s yield, which rarely holds true in practice. This does not mean U.S. Treasuries are unsuitable as collateral—in fact, they are the most common collateral in traditional markets. The question is whether leveraging exposure to them on-chain is economically viable. The assets best suited for DeFi are those with stable returns that are typically inaccessible to retail investors—reinsurance is one such example.

This creates a barbell structure: one end consists of short-duration, stable-return assets suitable for inclusion in the treasury; the other end comprises more volatile ETF-like products that holders can use as collateral to construct portfolios impossible in traditional brokerage accounts. Behind both ends lies a frequently cited insight: DeFi’s total value locked (TVL) remains highly correlated with cryptocurrency prices—only real assets can liberate on-chain finance from the price cycles of the crypto market.

Whenever the discussion turns to bottlenecks, the conclusion ultimately comes down to liquidity.

Institutions consistently rank the path as follows: first, regulatory clarity; then, increased liquidity; finally, a market size large enough to accommodate major institutional players. Currently, many large allocators still view this market as too small for their entry to make a meaningful impact; however, once liquidity improves and larger participants enter, the effect will begin to compound and expand.

At the asset level, what’s missing is atomic liquidity. Tokenized RWA typically cannot complete selling and redemption simultaneously, with settlement cycles of T+1 or even T+2, and private credit funds are even slower. Most of these limitations stem from regulation, not technology. In other words, on-chain finance will only truly scale when RWA can flow on-chain as instantly as SOL.

On the financing side, what’s lacking is fixed-rate capacity. Borrowers need certainty in their funding costs, and fixed-rate lending is the right direction—but only if there is sufficient capacity and liquidity under fixed rates. This is a constraint across the entire DeFi lending sector, not an issue specific to any single protocol.

The same applies to the trading platform. On-chain, 24/7 stock markets are constrained by liquidity: market makers need the ability to borrow securities and provide two-way quotes, which relies on prime brokerage services scalable to thousands of assets. After regular U.S. stock market hours, on-chain quotes thin out and spreads widen, with even more pronounced effects over the weekend.

This is precisely the key point of consensus one: without practical utility, assets have no sustained demand for trading or borrowing; without demand, liquidity cannot be established.

There is clearly no consensus on how far institutional adoption has progressed.

Optimists believe the turning point has arrived. Morgan Stanley has been experimenting on private blockchains for nearly a decade and describes this year’s progress as “a completely different pace.” At a recent event hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, several of the largest U.S. banks jointly discussed the integration of traditional finance with DeFi—an idea unthinkable just 18 months ago. Core market infrastructure providers have also aligned their acceleration phases with this same window, following regulatory shifts. In Hong Kong, HSBC recently issued a digital green bond for the SAR government, allowing investors to subscribe using fiat currency, tokenized central bank money, or HSBC tokenized deposits.

Conservative players, represented by BlackRock and Fidelity, view tokenization as a structural transformation in how asset management firms operate. To advance across asset classes and jurisdictions, it must be pursued steadily. This is a long-term endeavor, not an urgent priority: infrastructure must come first before products can scale. The distinction between prototypes and institutional-grade products lies in legal structures and regulatory frameworks, which in financial markets take years to establish.

The readiness level within institutions slows the pace even further. Some large traditional asset management firms do not interact directly with blockchain at all, instead relying on external partners to access the chain—precisely because their internal systems are not yet ready, and their technical teams have other priorities, such as AI. Meanwhile, many pension funds and insurance companies don’t even have wallets yet. Without wallets, there can be no blockchain access—custodial infrastructure is a prerequisite. While allocators are indeed entering the space, the pace remains slow: financial losses due to operational errors and security incidents continue to keep them cautious.

Both judgments can hold true simultaneously. The access layer is moving quickly: ETPs, custody, and co-issued products are enabling institutions to gain exposure first. The operations layer is moving more slowly: legal structures, custody arrangements, wallets, and internal systems all need to be addressed one by one. Beneath both lies the same fundamental requirement: for large institutions, trust is the most critical layer of infrastructure.

The second divergence is more directly related to on-chain projects: Are institutional entries adding value to DeFi or competing with it?

A representative of the incrementalist view is Multicoin Capital. Even the most bullish crypto brokers, after launching their own chains, still rely on existing DeFi applications on the backend for trading, perpetual contracts, and other functions. According to this perspective, traditional institutions will not transform themselves into crypto infrastructure companies; after adopting this technology, a significant portion of value will flow to DeFi applications and underlying public blockchains. Traditional finance moves slowly in product development, and to compete, it must leverage existing on-chain components; the more on-chain assets there are, the more strategies can be executed, and the larger the institutions that can participate.

The representative of this competitive argument is RockawayX. Institutions are not coming to invest in on-chain projects; instead, they are entering with their own products, targeting DeFi distribution channels and liquidity. Based on this assessment, on-chain projects must build their own business development and sales channels rather than waiting for institutions to come to them.

The Vault mode offers a third solution. On the same day, Mark Hull of Kamino hosted another roundtable on on-chain configurations and vaults, featuring Bitwise, Fasanara Capital, Steakhouse Financial, and Sanctum. Mark Hull opened the discussion by noting that Kamino’s lending market has expanded its accepted collateral from SOL to include long-tail crypto assets, tokenized RWA, credit funds, reinsurance, and tokenized equities, resulting in a more modular market structure and increased complexity for lenders. In response, lending vaults have emerged: users deposit assets into non-custodial vaults, where curators allocate them across various markets.

In this structure, traditional institutions do not replace DeFi but instead enter as curators or issuers. Bitwise refers to the vault as “ETF 2.0”: many aspects of the fund are encoded into smart contracts, eliminating the need for numerous roles required by traditional funds and enabling greater scalability than manually managed funds; investors can track fund flows block by block, rather than waiting until quarter-end. Constraints are equally transparent: asset allocation, collateral pricing via oracle feeds, and liquidation conditions are all publicly verifiable; if the curator wishes to modify the vault’s investment parameters, a timelock period must pass, giving users the opportunity to exit first. Traditional asset management relies on hundreds of pages of rarely read disclosures, whereas on-chain constraints are directly written into code. For issuers, the vault serves as a value container: once fund shares are tokenized, they can be combined with other products to reach investors previously inaccessible. Moreover, DeFi users make autonomous decisions within their own wallets—without sales representatives pushing products—so the product must be simple by design, which is precisely what the vault is built for.

The two perspectives are not necessarily contradictory—it all depends on which layer you're looking at. At the end-user distribution layer, institutions indeed come with products to compete for channels; at the asset management and infrastructure layer, they are more likely to engage with existing on-chain markets as curators and issuers. As Mark Hull concluded at the roundtable, the integration of traditional finance and DeFi is “just from day 0 to day 1, and still has to get to day 10.”

Compared to the current pace, institutions are more aligned in their outlook for the longer term. By 2030, mainstream institutional adoption is expected to be far more widespread, with RWA becoming a routine tool for liquidity management and collateral optimization rather than an innovation. Fidelity anticipates that within a decade, at least one-third of traditional investors will hold tokenized funds through various interfaces, whether or not they are aware of it. By then, on-chain identity issues are also expected to be largely resolved, as fragmented AML and KYC standards remain one of the biggest barriers to scaling.

Returning to “Tokenized. Now What?” the answer isn’t a single product, but a set of conditions: the asset must have real utility, be accepted as collateral, be liquid, be allocated by investors, and the institutions themselves must be prepared. The race to issue has largely ended; now it’s about who can first fulfill these conditions.

This article is compiled from the live discussion at the Solana Capital Forum on October 6, 2026, and does not represent the views of any participating institutions or constitute investment advice.