Haotian|Mar 27, 2026 08:49
After reading the article @ a16zcrypto, the core point is to express a viewpoint: we will usher in the biggest opportunity for upgrading financial infrastructure in thirty years, just like the popularization of electronic transactions in the 1990s:
1) Before the emergence of electronic trading in 1990, Wall Street traders had to rely on phone calls to place orders, which took several minutes to complete and had large spreads. The entry threshold for ordinary people was relatively high. Until the emergence of new infrastructure represented by ECN and online securities firms, electronic order books replaced manual matching, and the price differences caused by commissions were gradually reduced to zero, the financial market experienced explosive development. At that time, new infrastructure providers such as Schwab and TD Ameritrade ate up almost all of the profits that used to belong to established securities firms.
2) And this round of massive tokenization of assets, many Crypto natives are still indifferent, but Wall Street is already taking real action.
DTCC is the central clearing institution of the US securities market. In 2024, it handled a transaction volume of 370 billion US dollars (about 40 times the global GDP), and is now putting US treasury bond bonds on the chain;
ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, announced in January this year its on chain stock trading platform, which supports 24/7 trading of US stocks and ETFs, fragmented holdings, stablecoin settlement, and is backed by tokenized deposits of BNY and Citi;
Tradeweb completed the first real-time financing of treasury bond on the chain in August 2025. On Saturday, the market was closed, and the counterparties were Bank of America, Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial. The settlement was completed with USDC.
Nasdaq also submitted its own rule change application to the SEC in September 2025.
DTCC, Nasdaq, ICE and other top players in the financial market have basically covered the entire chain of the US capital market from trading, clearing to settlement. Their collective and unified approach to asset tokenization is already sufficient to illustrate the problem;
3) But there is also a key point here, whose profit is being eliminated by the new infrastructure?
In the 1990s, ECN eliminated the spread income of market makers, and online brokers eliminated the commission of traditional brokers. This time, the atomic settlement of smart contracts on the chain directly compresses DTCC's clearing commission, custodian's custody fees, and prime broker's financing spreads.
The strange thing is that these people whose profits have been compressed are themselves the main participants and promoters of this tokenization. They are both disruptors and beneficiaries of the next round of infrastructure upgrades.
The above.
This also explains why a16z referred to this migration as the 'biggest infrastructure upgrade' rather than a 'new track opportunity'.
Perhaps only some Crypto native exchanges foolishly think that opening the US stock tokenization platform first and laying out the full set of RWA infrastructure services can become the direct beneficiaries of this wave of dividends. After all, in the last round of the electronic revolution, it was not the barbarians outside the market who killed established securities firms, but new infrastructure players like Schwab who obtained licenses, understood compliance, and dared to lower prices.
This round may be the same.
Share To
Timeline
HotFlash
APP
X
Telegram
CopyLink