A Mainstream Research Firm Makes the Tokenization Case
Citrini Research, a shop better recognized for its analysis of artificial intelligence, broad technology, and macro market trends than for crypto advocacy, published a 79-page report last week titled Breaking the Wall. The document devotes itself to tokenization — the process of representing traditional financial instruments such as equities, bonds, credit products, and commodities as digital tokens on a blockchain.
The publication itself is no longer breaking news, yet the broader significance of a widely followed, non-crypto-native research house dedicating such a substantial effort to the topic is hard to overstate. It signals that the narrative around onchain finance has shifted from speculative hobbyist speculation to a framework that large institutional investors are now expected to weigh in their allocation decisions.
For well over a decade, the crypto sector has been assembling an increasingly complex stack of trading venues, lending protocols, custody solutions, and payment rails. Yet the assets that most investors actually wanted to hold — U.S. Treasuries, corporate credit, listed stocks, and commodity exposure — remained locked inside legacy financial infrastructure. The core criticism that persisted was that blockchain technology looked like a sophisticated solution searching for a problem: if all the plumbing ultimately served was trading one token against another, the purpose of the infrastructure was unclear.
Citrini's central argument reframes that debate. The firm contends that once real-world assets sit onchain, they begin to behave less like static entries in a ledger and more like software components. A tokenized share of Nvidia, for example, can be transferred between applications, pledged as collateral, borrowed against, or embedded into structured products without every intermediary rebuilding its own custody and settlement layer from the ground up. That composability, Citrini argues, is where the genuine economic upside lies.
The Building Blocks Are Finally Aligning
Several preconditions that were once missing are now in place. Stablecoins have effectively placed digital cash onchain, while wallets, decentralized exchanges, and DeFi lending protocols have reached a level of maturity that supports real transaction volume. On the distribution side, mainstream platforms including Robinhood (HOOD) and Coinbase (COIN) are beginning to offer tokenized products to retail and semi-professional investors. Meanwhile, regulators in the United States and a growing number of other jurisdictions are sketching out clearer legal pathways for tokenized securities to enter regulated markets.
Crypto-native participants have championed the real-world-asset (RWA) thesis for years, but Citrini's contribution is translating that thesis into the vocabulary large allocators use: where exactly does the revenue land, and which entities capture it?
Mapping the Economics: Who Captures the Value?
Citrini acknowledges that a wave of tokenized assets flowing onchain will lift the broader crypto ecosystem, but it does not automatically make Bitcoin (BTC, $81,499.32) or Ether (ETH, $2,406.17) the optimal vehicle, nor does it guarantee that whichever blockchain hosts the most tokens will outperform.
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and current chief investment officer of Maelstrom, put the skepticism bluntly in a recent interview with The Rollup. RWA tokenization has been discussed for roughly a decade, he noted, and simply re-recording a security that already exists in a digital database onto a different ledger does not, in his view, generate meaningful new value. "Okay, doing better bookkeeping. Thank you," Hayes said. "Where are you actually going to make money in tokenization?"
The revenue streams that tokenized equities can unlock are varied: issuance fees for the firms that build the token, trading commissions, stablecoin demand generated by settlement, lending activity, and collateral usage. But those dollars can flow to very different players depending on where in the stack a firm sits.
Christian Magoon, CEO of Amplify ETFs, which manages the tokenization-focused TKNQ fund, sees infrastructure providers evolving into what he calls "toll booths on the blockchain toll roads." He also highlights distribution as a potentially equally valuable layer, pointing to Coinbase, Robinhood, banks, and wealth-management platforms that already command customer relationships.
Jeff Dorman, CIO at the investment firm Arca, told CoinDesk that the mechanical act of tokenization itself is likely to become increasingly commoditized as more competitors enter the space. The more durable economics, he argued, emerge after an asset is already onchain — when it is actively traded, lent out, or used as collateral in a borrowing arrangement. He identified a broad set of potential beneficiaries, ranging from Securitize (SECZ) to crypto-native protocols such as the onchain trading venue Hyperliquid, the decentralized lender Aave (AAVE, $151.60), and the decentralized exchange Aerodrome (AERO).
Zach Pandl, head of digital asset research at Grayscale, offered a simpler positioning strategy. "The most direct way to position a portfolio for the tokenization megatrend is to own the networks that host RWAs and process transactions," he told CoinDesk. He named Ethereum (ETH, $2,406.17), BNB Chain (BNB, $718.29), and Solana (SOL) as the current industry leaders in that regard, while noting that Avalanche (AVAX) and Canton (CC, $0.1038) have pursued more institutionally oriented approaches that could attract growing demand as banks and asset managers push more activity onchain.
AI Agents and the Road Ahead
Hayes sees an even larger narrative layered on top of the tokenization story: autonomous AI agents managing financial services end-to-end. "I think the best story I want to tell is that AI agents will run all of your financial services," he said. In his vision, software agents would continuously rebalance a portfolio, sweep idle cash into higher-yielding opportunities, hunt for cheaper financing, and reallocate collateral as market conditions shift — all programmatically, around the clock, without a human clicking through each individual transaction.
That capability maps neatly onto the infrastructure crypto has been building for years: programmable assets, always-on markets, smart-contract-based lending, and near-instant settlement. Citrini reached a similar conclusion, describing tokenized assets as a translation of traditional financial products into a machine-native format that AI agents can manipulate directly.
Even so, the landscape is far from settled. Magoon emphasized that the market remains "extremely early," with tokenized assets still a tiny sliver of global financial markets. "The long runway ahead increases the likelihood that future winners may differ from today's leaders," he cautioned.
One concrete data point from the current cycle: diversified RWA stablecoins are sustaining yields in the 5-to-7 percent range by backing their value with real credit, even as pure crypto funding rates have compressed to roughly 4 percent. Separately, the GENIUS framework is expected to push a meaningful share of yield-generating activity offchain, with the total addressable market for that segment projected to reach approximately $4 billion within three years.
The direction of travel appears clear. The question that Citrini's report forces the industry to confront is far less settled: who, specifically, will bank the profits?
