Original Author: Jason Rosenthal

Original Compilation: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Wall Street is no longer just symbolically exploring blockchain but is migrating to it.

After years of hesitation, various institutions that underpin global capital markets—including exchanges, clearinghouses, and electronic trading platforms—are moving their businesses on-chain.

What is currently happening is the largest infrastructure upgrade in capital markets since the shift to electronic trading thirty years ago.

However, most people will only realize this shift has taken place after it is completed.

Why Now: Speed Changes Everything

Every institution moving in this direction shares the same belief—that on-chain infrastructure will significantly enhance the speed of capital circulation. History has made clear what results this can yield.

Looking back at the transformation brought about by electronic exchanges in the 1990s: before the advent of electronic communication networks and online brokers, a transaction could take minutes to complete, bid-ask spreads were quoted in fractions, and market access was limited by geographic location and capital scale. With improvements in infrastructure, spreads narrowed significantly, commissions dropped from $150 to $9.95, and further to zero, leading to explosive growth in trading volume and significant increases in individual investor participation. By the 21st century, the market landscape was starkly different from that of the 90s—not only had costs decreased dramatically, but the market size also expanded massively.

Tokenization applies the same logic to the global financial system: achieving around-the-clock trading, instant settlement, seamless cross-border circulation, fractionalizing assets that previously required six-figure capital thresholds, and allowing collateral to flow in real-time rather than sitting idle overnight. This brings about higher capital circulation speeds, broader participation, and a larger total market size.

What exactly does tokenization mean? Tokenized assets refer to digital representations of real-world assets—such as U.S. Treasuries, Apple stocks, and real estate contracts—recorded as programmable tokens on the blockchain. Unlike the traditional model where custodians track ownership through a centralized database during a single timezone's business hours, tokenized assets exist on-chain: they can be transferred, programmed, and settled instantly from anywhere in the world, at any time.

They are not derivatives but the real assets themselves, with superior underlying infrastructures.

Institutions Are Taking Action

In December 2025, the U.S. Securities Custody Clearing Corporation received a no-action letter from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, allowing it to tokenize real-world assets on an approved blockchain. The U.S. Securities Custody Clearing Corporation processed a total of $37 trillion in transactions in 2024. The company plans to launch production-grade tokenization services for U.S. Treasuries in the first half of 2026.

On January 19, 2026, the New York Stock Exchange announced the launch of a platform for 24-hour on-chain trading and settlement of U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds—supporting fractional trading, instant settlement, and stablecoin financing—and collaborated with BNY Mellon and Citibank to provide tokenized deposit support for the clearinghouses under the Intercontinental Exchange. The world’s most iconic securities exchanges are migrating on-chain.

In August 2025, Tradeweb completed its first fully on-chain real-time transaction for U.S. Treasuries, funded by USDC—the transaction was executed on a Saturday, outside of traditional settlement windows, with participants including Bank of America, Castle Securities, U.S. Securities Custody Clearing Corporation, and Virtu Financial. Its scope has been continuously expanding each quarter and now encompasses cross-border settlements and intraday settlements. Nasdaq also submitted its own rule change proposal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in September 2025.

This series of movements increasingly reflects an overarching trend of migration, rather than isolated experimental attempts.

Implicit Costs in the Existing System

Another force driving this process is the current market structure, which is built around intermediaries rather than centered on the market itself.

To illustrate with a typical securities transaction: investors pay a bid-ask spread to brokers. In institutional trading, primary brokers charge financing fees. Exchanges and transfer agents charge their respective fees. Custodians charge asset custody fees. The U.S. Securities Custody Clearing Corporation charges fees at each stage of clearing, net settlement, and settlement. Even if the U.S. achieves T+1 settlement in 2024—this reform took decades due to the previous settlement cycle lasting several days—funds still have to be locked overnight, constituting a "structural cost" for all participants.

Smart contracts and atomic settlement technology can compress these layers. Now, both parties can complete transactions instantly on-chain and achieve final settlement.

The rent extraction in the current system—its profit margins—will not disappear… but will transform into opportunities for new entrants. In other words, the profit margins of existing institutions represent the opportunities for you to build new infrastructure.

The final key is the clarity of regulation—and this condition is finally beginning to take shape. If the current momentum continues, the impact of the CLARITY Act on traditional finance is expected to be akin to the impact of the GENIUS Act on the adoption and development of stablecoins.

The institutional guarantees anticipated by large institutions are just around the corner. So, what does this mean for builders?

The migration of global financial infrastructure to on-chain will create demand for entirely new categories of products and services.

The most rapid actions taken by established institutions are not your competitors but your clients. The U.S. Securities Custody Clearing Corporation has no intention of developing middleware itself, the New York Stock Exchange has no intention of building compliance tools, and Tradeweb has no intention of creating a cross-border distribution layer.

These institutions are laying down a regulated, institutionally standardized foundational layer. Meanwhile, founders are responsible for building all applications that operate on this foundation.

This mirrors the development model of the 1990s. Exchanges did not create ETRADE, nor did they create Bloomberg, and they certainly did not develop the order management systems and prime brokerage platforms that define the next era. These outcomes were all crafted by founders who foresaw future trends.

More participants joining, faster capital circulation, lower transaction frictions.

More abundant liquidity, broader market space.

History has clearly revealed the ultimate direction of this process.

The window for building the infrastructural foundation of a tokenized financial market has opened.

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