Author: Larry Fink (BlackRock CEO) & Rob Goldstein (BlackRock COO)

Original Title: Larry Fink and Rob Goldstein on how tokenisation could transform finance

Fifty years ago, moving funds required mailing.

Twenty years ago, cross-border transactions had to wait "days."

Today, millisecond-level transactions are no longer something to boast about.

The real transformation lies not in speed, but in reshaping "the way assets exist."

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and COO Rob Goldstein offer a calm assessment of this era: in the future, stocks, bonds, real estate, funds, and even currencies will become "a line of code on the chain."

This is not a crypto story; it is a "reconstruction moment" for finance.

Fifty years ago, the speed of fund movement was as slow as postal delivery. When one of us (Larry) began his career in 1976, trades were conducted over the phone and settled with paper certificates sent via courier. In 1977, a technology called SWIFT standardized electronic information transfer between banks, reducing transaction times from days to minutes. Today, transactions between New York and London are executed in milliseconds.

Now, the financial industry is entering the next major evolution of market infrastructure—one that can transfer assets faster and more securely than systems that have served investors for decades. It began in 2009 when a developer using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin as a shared digital ledger that could record transactions without intermediaries. A few years later, the same technology—blockchain—sparked something even more transformative: Tokenisation.

Tokenisation involves recording ownership on a digital ledger. It allows almost all assets, from real estate to corporate debt or currency, to exist on a single digital record that participants can independently verify. Initially, the financial world—including us—struggled to see the grand idea. Tokenisation was entangled with the crypto craze, which often appeared speculative. However, in recent years, the traditional financial industry has recognized what lies beneath the hype: tokenisation can greatly expand the world of investable assets, beyond the publicly traded stocks and bonds that currently dominate the market.

Tokenised assets offer two major benefits. First, they provide the potential for instant settlement of transactions. Today's markets operate on different settlement timelines, exposing buyers and sellers to the risk that one party may fail to meet its obligations. Standardizing instant settlement in global markets would be another leap beyond what SWIFT once achieved.

Second, private market assets still heavily rely on paper—manual processes, customized settlements, and records that fail to keep pace with developments in other parts of the financial industry. Tokenisation can replace paper with code, reducing the friction that makes asset trading costly and slow. It can transform large, illiquid holdings like real estate or infrastructure into smaller, more accessible units, thereby expanding market participation that has long been dominated by large institutions.

Technology alone cannot eliminate all barriers. Regulation and investor protection remain crucial. However, by lowering costs and complexity, tokenisation can provide more investors with greater opportunities for diversified investments. Early signs of progress are already visible. Tokens representing "real world" traditional financial assets (stocks, bonds, etc.) still account for a small share of global equity and fixed income markets, but they are growing rapidly—approximately 300% in the past 20 months.

Many early adopters are found in the developing world, where banking services are limited. Nearly three-quarters of cryptocurrency holders live outside the West. Meanwhile, the economies that established modern finance—the U.S., U.K., and EU—are lagging, at least in terms of where transactions are taking place. Admittedly, many of the companies most likely to lead the transformation of the tokenised financial system, including leaders in the stablecoin space, are American companies. But this early advantage is not guaranteed.

If history is any guide, today's tokenisation is roughly equivalent to the internet in 1996—when Amazon sold only $16 million worth of books, and three of today's "Big Seven" tech giants had yet to be founded. Tokenisation could develop at internet speed—faster than most expect, achieving significant growth in the coming decades.

It will not quickly replace the existing financial system. Instead, it can be seen as a bridge being built simultaneously from both banks of a river, converging in the middle. One side is traditional institutions. The other side is digital-first innovators: stablecoin issuers, fintech companies, and public blockchains.

Rather than competing, both sides are learning how to interoperate. In the future, people will not place stocks and bonds in one portfolio and cryptocurrencies in another. Various assets may one day be bought, sold, and held through a single digital wallet.

The task for policymakers and regulators is clear: to help build this bridge quickly and safely. The best approach is not to create an entirely new rulebook for digital markets but to update our existing rules so that traditional and tokenised markets can work together.

We have already seen the power of this connection. The first emerging market exchange-traded funds (ETFs) connected stock markets from over 20 countries into a single fund, making global investing easier. Bond ETFs have done the same for fixed income, linking dealer markets with public exchanges, allowing investors to trade more efficiently. Now, with spot Bitcoin ETFs, even digital assets are on traditional exchanges. Each innovation builds a bridge.

The same principles apply to tokenisation. Regulators should strive for consistency: risks should be assessed based on their nature, not their packaging. Even if bonds exist on a blockchain, they are still bonds.

But innovation requires "guardrails": clear buyer protection measures to ensure that tokenised products are safe and transparent; strong counterparty risk standards to prevent shocks from spreading to platforms; and digital identity verification systems so that those wishing to trade and invest can have the same confidence as when using a credit card or wire transfer.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, in his new book about the 1929 stock market crash, revisits the failures that led to the birth of the modern financial system. Some were technical: on "Black Tuesday," stock tickers lagged by hours, unable to keep up with the surge in trading volume. Others were systemic: a financial system that grew faster than its safeguards.

Tokenisation can modernize the infrastructure that still makes certain parts of the financial system slow and costly, bringing more people into the world's most powerful wealth creation engine: the markets. However, as the events of 1929 taught us, every action to broaden participation must be accompanied by updated safeguards. Tokenisation must achieve two things: to grow faster and to grow safely, while building trust.

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