Author: Liang Yu

Editor: Zhao Yidan

On December 7, 2025, Paul S. Atkins, Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), made a prediction during an interview with Fox Business News that sparked significant market interest. He pointed out that driven by digital assets, market digitization, and tokenization, the blockchain technology supporting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin may be widely adopted across the entire U.S. financial market within the next two years. Atkins believes that tokenization—using blockchain-based digital tokens to represent stocks and various assets—will be the next trend, promising substantial benefits in terms of transparency and risk management for the financial system.

This forward-looking judgment from the regulatory top has quickly become a focal point of discussion in the global finance and technology sectors. Is the SEC Chairman's "two-year outlook" a rational prediction based on industry trends, or an overly optimistic policy declaration? If this prediction points to a possible technological evolution, what will the implementation path look like? What unavoidable structural challenges will it face? This article will attempt to analyze the logic behind this prediction and the profound discussions it may provoke, based on facts and data.

1. Core Drivers: Interwoven Evolution of Efficiency, Regulation, and Liquidity Demand

If the U.S. financial market migrates to a blockchain architecture, the fundamental driving force comes from the immense tension between the inherent ailments of the traditional financial system and the empowering potential of new technologies. The three main driving forces—efficiency revolution, regulatory demand, and liquidity release—intertwine to form the underlying logic of this migration.

The primary driving force is the pursuit of extreme efficiency and cost reduction. The clearing and settlement systems of traditional financial markets rely on complex reconciliations and manual operations among numerous intermediaries, resulting in slow processes and high costs. The near-real-time settlement brought by blockchain technology and the automation achieved through smart contracts can significantly compress transaction cycles and reduce intermediary fees.

The improvement in efficiency directly drives the regulatory demand for transparency and risk management. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the opacity and regulatory lag of the financial system. The immutable and fully traceable characteristics inherent in blockchain technology can provide regulators with the coveted "God's eye view." All transaction records are visible on a shared ledger, making asset flows and ownership changes clear, thus providing unprecedented tools for implementing penetrating regulation and real-time monitoring of systemic risks.

The combination of efficiency enhancement and regulatory transparency further releases a third force—the liquidity of vast "sleeping assets." Globally, a large number of assets such as private equity, real estate, and private credit cannot be widely traded due to high thresholds, cumbersome procedures, and poor liquidity. Tokenization can significantly lower investment barriers by breaking down large assets into smaller, standardized digital rights, attracting global long-tail capital. The positive feedback loop formed among these three elements constitutes the core intrinsic motivation for the market to migrate to a more efficient and transparent structure.

2. Migration Path Outlook: A Complex Transition from Asset Tokenization to Ecological Reconstruction

The realization of "the entire financial market migrating to blockchain" is more likely to present a gradual "two-step" blueprint from partial to overall, from foundational to ecological. This transition between the two stages is filled with complex integrations of technology, law, and market.

The first stage is the comprehensive tokenization of assets. Successful tokenization practices have clear thresholds. Assets that are relatively stable in value, have clear legal ownership, and can be reliably verified off-chain will become the pioneers of migration. Therefore, the migration will start with asset categories that best meet these conditions: first, top-tier credit assets such as U.S. Treasury bonds and money market funds, with U.S. Treasury bonds being the preferred choice for institutions due to their national credit backing and relatively stable prices. Then, it will expand to high-quality corporate bonds and credit assets, gradually extending to real estate income rights and commodities.

As high-quality assets begin to exist widely in token form, it will naturally transition to the more challenging second stage: the on-chain reconstruction of market infrastructure such as trading, settlement, and custody. The core question is where and how these on-chain assets will be traded and managed for liquidity. Currently, two models may emerge: one is a deep technological transformation of existing mainstream exchanges, enabling their systems to natively accept, trade, and settle on-chain assets. This process faces significant challenges, including reconstructing core trading engines to adapt to the asynchronous settlement characteristics of blockchain, developing compliant interfaces for interaction with on-chain smart contracts, and rebuilding data pipelines with custody and clearing institutions. The second is the emergence of entirely new alternative trading systems based on blockchain architecture.

The profound contradiction exposed during this transition phase is interoperability. Existing financial infrastructure is highly centralized and closed, while the ideal blockchain ecosystem advocates openness and composability. How can assets issued on private chains or specific consortium chains flow safely and compliantly within a broader public chain ecosystem? Ultimately, we may see a hybrid financial ecosystem: at the bottom are compliant and trustworthy asset tokens; in the middle are regulated on-chain trading platforms and audited DeFi protocols; at the top are rich financial innovation applications. The construction of this ecosystem is not only a technical realization but also a comprehensive migration of legal frameworks, regulatory consensus, and market participant habits.

3. Severe Challenges: The Triangular Game of Technology, Regulation, and Interests and Specific Dilemmas

Any prediction about achieving comprehensive migration in the short term must confront multiple severe and specific challenges. The technical feasibility, regulatory framework, and existing interest patterns form a solid "impossible triangle."

Technical scalability and maturity are the foremost hurdles. Currently, the annual trading volume of the U.S. Treasury market reaches trillions of dollars, and the daily trading volume of the global financial market is astronomical. Although existing mainstream public chains have made significant progress through scaling solutions, they still face challenges in throughput, transaction finality, and network fees under extreme conditions when supporting such high-frequency, large-value transactions. More importantly, financial-grade applications require nearly 100% security and stability, and incidents such as smart contract vulnerabilities and cross-chain bridge attacks are common, highlighting that the technical infrastructure still needs to undergo rigorous testing before maturing.

The fragmentation and uncertainty of the regulatory framework are the biggest soft constraints. Currently, global regulation of tokenized assets is in a "gray area." In the U.S., there has long been a dispute between the SEC and CFTC over whether certain digital assets fall under the jurisdiction of "securities" or "commodities," leading to compliance dilemmas for projects. The core challenge of regulation lies in methodology: how to efficiently and seamlessly embed effective rules from traditional finance, such as "know your customer," anti-money laundering, and investor suitability management, into a decentralized or semi-decentralized on-chain environment in the form of "regulation as code"?

The path dependence and resistance to restructuring of traditional interest patterns pose deep social challenges. The migration of the financial market to blockchain is essentially a reorganization of production relations, inevitably impacting the business models and profit centers of existing intermediaries. At the same time, the entire financial industry has invested enormous sunk costs in the existing system, including customized software systems, long-trained professional teams, and mature internal risk control processes. Switching to an entirely new paradigm means extremely high switching costs, learning curves, and unknown operational risks, creating strong institutional inertia.

4. Conclusion: An Irreversible but Inevitably Twisted Gradual Revolution

Returning to SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins' much-discussed "two-year outlook." Considering the practical constraints of technology, regulation, and interests, achieving the "entire" U.S. financial market's migration to blockchain within two years is an operationally nearly impossible challenge. However, the true value of this prediction lies in the clear strategic signal it sends from a key regulator's perspective: the migration of the underlying technological paradigm of the financial market has risen from a marginal technological experiment to one of the serious future options considered at the regulatory high level, and it has been endowed with an urgent time expectation.

The transformation is more likely to take the form of a gradual, integrated, and trial-and-error-filled long revolution. In the next two years, we may see substantial developments: the categories and scales of tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds, private equity funds, and other high-quality RWA assets continue to expand; mainstream financial institutions will apply blockchain technology more broadly in back-end clearing and settlement processes; more limited pilot projects involving core asset tokenization will be approved in regulatory sandboxes of major financial centers; and significant progress will be made in key federal legislation regarding digital assets.

At the same time, the different regulatory paths chosen by major economies such as the U.S., China, and Europe, based on their respective political and economic structures, financial system statuses, and risk tolerances, provide a diversified "control group" for this global experiment. This diversity itself is also a source of risk dispersion and resilience for the global financial system.

Ultimately, the essence of finance is the exchange of value and the transmission of trust across time and space. Blockchain technology, as a new "trust machine," has a historical mission not merely to replace existing systems but to provide more efficient, transparent, and verifiable trust solutions for an increasingly complex and globalized economic network through cryptographic guarantees, distributed consensus, and programmability. Regardless of how many technical bottlenecks, regulatory gaps, and interest games lie ahead, the evolution of the financial system towards a higher degree of digitization, intelligence, and trustworthiness is an irreversible trend. This migration may not have a completely clear destination yet, but the journey has undoubtedly begun, and its path will be more tortuous, profound, and enlightening than the initial prediction.

Some sources of information:

· "U.S. SEC Chairman: The Entire U.S. Financial Market May Migrate to On-Chain Within Two Years"

· "Latest Speech by U.S. SEC Chairman: Reforming IPO Disclosure and Other Regulatory Rules to Revitalize the U.S. Capital Market"

· "U.S. SEC Chairman: All Markets in the U.S. Are Expected to Migrate to On-Chain Operations Within the Next Two Years"

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。