Crypto for Advisors: It’s time for tokenization to get to work

CoinDesk Indices Crypto for Advisors: It’s time for tokenization to get to work By Jason Barraza , Joshua de Vos | Edited by Sarah Morton Jul 23, 2026, 2:53 p.m. 5 min read Make preferred on Share Share this article Copy link X icon X (Twitter) LinkedIn Facebook Email Make preferred on Summary Show You’re reading Crypto for Advisors, CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter that unpacks digital assets for financial advisors. Subscribe here to get it every Thursday. Happy Thursday, advisors! In today’s newsletter, Jason Barraza explores why the conversation at TokenizeThis 2026 shifted from "if" to "how" as asset managers prioritize real-world utility over hype. He also highlights the remaining infrastructure gaps that must be solved to unlock the next phase of institutional adoption. Then, in “Ask an Expert,” Joshua de Vos from CoinDesk Research answers questions about tokenized investment products and current market trends. Happy reading. Tokenization grew up in 2026, now it has to get to work Key takeaways from TokenizeThis 2026, where the debate shifted from whether real-world assets belong on-chain to whether anyone is actually using them. Bitcoin sat around $60,000 for most of the TokenizeThis 2026 conference, and almost nobody on stage seemed to care. The crypto and tokenization narratives have diverged. Tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) have pushed past $30 billion , roughly six times where they sat at the start of 2025. During their keynote , RedStone’s founders cited an EY and Coinbase Institutional survey which found 64% of asset managers now want to tokenize, up from 40% a year earlier. As the keynote put it, the argument about demand for tokenization is over. Regulation is why the mood changed from last year. The GENIUS Act gave payment stablecoins legitimacy, and speakers repeatedly pointed to the CLARITY Act, still working through the Senate, as the bigger unlock. RedStone co-founder Marcin Kazmierczak framed it bluntly: CLARITY could be a 10x or even 100x moment relative to GENIUS, because it opens the door to the full range of asset classes. Where’s the traction? Cash and collateral are the beachheads Collateral is where tokenization earns its keep first. On the repo panel , Broadridge's Robert Krugman said his firm now moves around $370 billion of tokenized repo a day on the Canton network. That is a sliver of the $12 trillion US repo market, but a real one, and the programmability pitch is simple. "If you want to borrow for five minutes, you pay for five minutes [instead of a full day]. It's a no-brainer," said Ami Ben-David, CEO at Ownera. Asset managers echoed utility over novelty. A recurring principle was that if you tokenize a product, it has to be a net better product than the one it replaces. Apollo's Christine Moy said the firm's tokenized private credit fund has confirmed what she calls the "superpowers" of onchain assets: secondary liquidity for otherwise illiquid products, and the ability to post private credit as collateral in DeFi protocols like Aave and Morpho. Treasury desks are coming around for similar reasons. On the Onchain Treasury Management panel , WisdomTree's Maredith Hannon described a small US construction company paying an Argentine vendor today, through a tokenized money market fund behind a familiar web interface. No second bank account, and the treasurer earns yield while the money moves. Citi's Ryan Rugg described the bank's tokenized deposits and its 24/7 dollar clearing, while stressing that clients "don't want just a Citi token." They want multi-bank rails. The gap between minting and utility What is still broken? Plenty, and panelists said so. Distribution first. Moy's point was that the next wave of investors started with bitcoin and a cartoon monkey, not a blue-chip stock, and you meet them in their wallet. Maple has taken that literally, originating loans on-chain in stablecoins. There’s also a challenge in compliance. Fidelity's Jasmine Jia described a manager thrown into a scramble when a client received a token as an airdrop, a trivial sum that still tripped internal alarms and put compliance modernization on the agenda. The earlier-mentioned survey backed her up, with 49% naming the integration of blockchain into traditional portfolio and risk frameworks as their biggest readiness gap. Additional Results from the EY and Coinbase Institutional Survey Finally, there’s fragmentation and lack of interoperability. On the settlement panel , Stellar’s Raja Chakravorti called interoperability the single greatest long-term unlock, since assets stuck on a single platform or blockchain cannot move freely. With hundreds of chains and competing notions of finality, liquidity spreads thinner and thinner. Ripple's Lauren Berta noted that finality varies across chains, and a trade counted as settled can still reverse, which does not scale. No one on stage claimed to have