Tokenised assets are real-world holdings converted into digital tokens and recorded on a blockchain — property, bonds, equities, commodities or funds. Each token represents ownership, whole or fractional, and every transaction is recorded transparently.
Why capital markets care
The appeal is not novelty. It is settlement time, fractional access to assets with high unit values, and a shared record that removes a layer of reconciliation between counterparties.
For institutions, the reconciliation point matters most. A meaningful share of post-trade cost exists purely because each participant maintains their own version of the truth and then spends money agreeing it with everyone else's.
The honest constraints
Regulatory treatment still varies significantly by jurisdiction, and liquidity in tokenised secondary markets remains thin for most asset classes. Neither problem is solved by better technology.
The institutions making progress are running tokenisation alongside existing infrastructure rather than in place of it, on asset classes where the regulatory position is settled. That is a slower path, but it is the one that survives an audit.