Tokenization : Rebuilding Capital Markets on Digital Rails
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
Tokenisation is supposed to be finance's next great unbundling: convert any real-world asset — a US Treasury, a slice of a Manhattan building, a private credit book — into a programmable token that settles in seconds, and the intermediaries that made markets slow, expensive, and exclusive simply fall away. By late 2025 the tokenised real-world asset market had passed $36 billion, led by Treasuries and private credit. The technology works. The question our report asks is a harder one: does it actually change anything?
Our report, Tokenising Capital Markets, traces the full arc from the mechanics of tokenisation to the uncomfortable gap between what has been built and what has been promised. We start with how it works — origination through an SPV or trust, issuance via smart contract, minting and distribution — and immediately confront the problem hiding underneath: holding a token almost never means owning the asset. In most jurisdictions the token is a contractual claim on a legal wrapper, not legal title, and that distinction matters enormously if something goes wrong. We map the jurisdictional patchwork (Switzerland's DLT Act, the UK's 2025 property law, the SEC's January 2026 confirmation that tokenised securities are still securities) and the layered "claims on claims" structures that almost none of which have been stress-tested in a real insolvency.
From there we move to the plumbing. Settlement is only as fast as its slowest leg, and most live issuances still settle the cash leg off-chain — reintroducing exactly the counterparty risk tokenisation was meant to remove. We examine the race to close that gap: tokenised deposits (JPMorgan Kinexys, HSBC, UBS), wholesale CBDCs, Project Agorá, and the interoperability problem that leaves each platform a "digital island." We then survey the regulatory and accounting landscape, where IOSCO, the SEC, the FCA, and MAS are slowly converging on "same activity, same risk, same regulation" without yet agreeing on a common taxonomy or a settlement asset.
What emerges is a market caught between pilots and production. Fixed income has genuinely crossed into live issuance; private equity, real estate, and trade finance remain structurally constrained. Issuance is real, but secondary trading is thin, fragmented, and illiquid — tokenised markets today, as we put it, resemble a used-car market more than a deep exchange. And the actors have not changed: custodians, asset managers, and banks are rebuilding traditional structures on new rails, not being replaced by them.
The Bocconi Students Fintech Society chose tokenization as the focus of this report because it is the clearest case in fintech of a technology that unambiguously works while its market impact remains unproven. The efficiency gains for institutions are real and visible. The revolution promised to everyone else — democratised access, deep liquidity, disintermediation — is still, for now, a claim on a claim.
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Published in July 2026
Project Team
Project Leader: Riccardo Lomele
Junior Analysts: Emilie Attalli-Bohneur, Martin Pelteshki, Livia de Guillebon, Nour Atif, Alp Celyan
Association Board :
Neil Maaouni (President & Head of Data Analysis), Mathilde Castagine (Vice President & Head of Events), Guillaume Abaz (Senior Advisor to the board), Andrea Botero (Head of M&A and VC), Antonina Bojanowska (Head of Generalist), Noé Wierzba (Head of Operations), Lucas Médina (Head of Corporate Analysis) , Alexandra Minca (Head of Communication)
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