Stack
The Tokenization Stack
How capital flows through tokenization. From institutional allocators to productive yield.
Institutions
37Who deploys capital into tokenized assets
The biggest asset managers are already onchain. That part happened. The more interesting question is who's actually deploying capital vs. who launched a pilot, put out a press release, and went quiet.
Issuance
28Who creates tokenized assets
Securitize and Ondo run most of the issuance. Everyone else is fighting for distribution. When the product is a wrapper, distribution is the only thing that differentiates you.
Infrastructure
20Who keeps tokenized assets safe and moving
Fireblocks is the default custodian. Hidden Road sold for $1.25B. The margins in tokenization are in plumbing, not products, and the plumbing layer is consolidating.
Chains
30Where tokenized assets settle
Every major tokenized money market fund settled on Ethereum. Solana is growing fast. Twenty-two other chains are competing for what's left, and the ones without real liquidity or issuer commitments will have a hard time staying relevant.
Verification
18Who verifies that tokenized assets are real
Chainlink owns the data layer. S&P rated JTRSY higher than any tokenized fund. Verification is the boring part of the stack, which is exactly why it's the part that unlocks everything else.
Tokenized Products
31The assets the stack exists to serve
$29B+ across BUIDL, USYC, JTRSY, PAXG, and accelerating. These are the actual assets that connect the stack. Issuers on one end, yield protocols on the other, chains underneath.
Stablecoins
26What everything settles in
USDT, USDC, PYUSD. The settlement layer. Increasingly backed by tokenized treasuries themselves, which means the base layer is starting to eat what it settles. That loop is worth watching.
Trading
18Where tokenized assets trade
Kraken, Coinbase, Robinhood all list tokenized stocks now. Distribution is still the bottleneck. Retail access might be what cracks it open. Nobody's solved it yet, but that's where the next winner comes from.
Yield
34Where tokenized assets become productive
Morpho, Aave, Spark, Pendle. This is where tokenized assets stop sitting in a wallet and start earning. A lot of the DeFi primitives needed to make this work at scale haven't been built yet. The yield layer is the reason institutions care about any of this.