Tokenized assets

The term covers several distinct products, each with its own page in this series: tokenized deposits, bank money on a ledger; tokenized money market funds such as BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's BENJI; tokenized Treasuries, now including DTCC's own tokenization service for US government debt; tokenized gold and commodities such as Pax Gold and Tether Gold; tokenized real estate, mostly property-backed bonds under Germany's eWpG; and tokenized stocks and equity. The Financial Stability Board's own list adds tokenized repurchase agreements and tokenized commercial paper to this group (FSB, October 22, 2024).

Private credit funds, which lend directly to companies outside the public bond market, have started issuing tokenized share classes. Apollo Global Management built a tokenized version of one of its credit funds with Securitize, letting qualified investors hold and move fund shares on a blockchain the way they would a tokenized money market fund share. The structure is the same as for other tokenized funds: the token stands for the fund share, and the fund's underlying loans stay exactly as illiquid and as credit-sensitive as before tokenization.

Private credit took longer to tokenize than Treasuries or money market funds because its loans are individually underwritten and hard to price daily, unlike a basket of government bonds. A tokenized private credit fund still reports its net asset value on the fund's own schedule, usually monthly, so the token's 24/7 tradability applies to the token itself, not to fresh pricing information about the loans behind it. Investors weighing a tokenized private credit fund against a tokenized Treasury fund are trading very different levels of transparency for a similar-looking wrapper.

A tokenized carbon credit represents a verified emissions reduction or removal, the same unit traded in the voluntary carbon market, recorded on a blockchain so it can change hands without a bespoke bilateral trade each time. J.P. Morgan has explored tokenizing carbon credits as part of its wider work on tokenized assets, aiming to give buyers a clearer link back to the underlying project and to make a historically illiquid market easier to trade. The credit's environmental integrity still depends on the registry and verification standard behind it, not on the blockchain it is tokenized on.

Tokenized assets in traditional banks show up as pilots and production services, not as a separate business line. DTCC's tokenization service, rolled out through 2026, works with the securities it already custodies for banks such as BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Vanguard, and in Germany, DekaBank, DZ BANK and Union Investment bought Siemens' tokenized bond issued under the eWpG. The Eurosystem's Pontes service settles the payment leg of many of these trades in central bank money, which is the piece that lets a European bank treat a tokenized asset transaction with the same finality as a conventional one. The Basel-based Bank for International Settlements and its Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures wrote in a report for the G20, Tokenisation in the context of money and other assets, that one platform can take over the intermediation across a financial asset's whole life cycle, which could lower transaction costs, and that the risks known from market infrastructures still apply, though they may show up in different ways.

Finance Loop is the meeting place for people at banks, asset managers and exchanges who work across the tokenized asset classes covered in this series. Finance Loop has been a partner of the Crypto Assets Conference of Frankfurt School and Deutsche Börse, where tokenization and market infrastructure make up much of the program, and lists tokenization events across Germany. Finance Loop has covered events on the topic, among them a TechQuartier evening where CoreLedger, Finemetal and S-Pro discussed tokenizing gold and real estate, a Point Zero Forum side event in Zurich with 21X and Franklin Templeton, and Capital & Code in Frankfurt, where tokenized funds are on the program. 21X, which runs a DLT venue for tokenized stocks, bonds and funds, has a strategic cooperation with Finance Loop.

Tokenized assets are financial or physical assets, such as deposits, fund shares, bonds, gold or property, recorded and transferred as tokens on a blockchain. Each still depends on the institution or custodian standing behind it.

The tokenized asset market spans several separate categories, from a multi-billion-dollar tokenized Treasury and money market fund segment led by BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's BENJI to a smaller tokenized private credit and carbon credit market still in its early stages. No single figure captures the whole market, because the categories have different issuers, rules and liquidity.

Yes. Apollo Global Management runs a tokenized private credit fund built with Securitize, and J.P. Morgan has worked on tokenizing carbon credits to make the voluntary carbon market easier to trade. Both stay tied to the same underlying asset and its own rules; tokenization changes only how the claim is recorded and moved.