Citrini sees a tokenization boom. The harder question is who profits

Crypto enthusiasts have spent years telling that finance – stocks, bonds and other financial assets – would eventually move onto blockchains.

Now, an influential research firm that Wall Street investors pay attention to has made the case for them.

Citrini Research, better known for its work on broader technology, AI and market trends than for cheerleading crypto, turned its attention last week to tokenization in a 79-page report titled Breaking the Wall.

The report itself isn't news anymore, but the argument behind it is worth sitting with because it marks how far the conversation has moved.

For years, crypto built increasingly sophisticated infrastructure for trading, lending and moving money, while most of the assets investors actually wanted to own — stocks, bonds, credit and commodities — stayed inside the traditional financial system. Now those assets are beginning to migrate onto the rails crypto spent more than a decade building.

Citrini summed it up in one line:

“Blockchains have finally found their raison d’être.”

Why it matters

For better or worse, one of the oldest knocks on crypto and blockchains was that it looked like a solution in search of a problem.

There were decentralized exchanges, automated lending protocols, crypto wallets and increasingly elaborate financial plumbing, but if all of it was mainly being used to trade one cryptocurrency against other cryptocurrency, the obvious question remained: what was the infrastructure actually built for?

Tokenization may finally provide a convincing answer.

U.S. Treasuries, credit, stocks, funds and other assets are increasingly moving onchain, and once they are there, the point isn't simply that an investor can trade Nvidia at 2 a.m on a Sunday.

The more interesting argument Citrini made is that tokenization can make financial assets behave more like software: moving between applications, serving as collateral, being borrowed against or plugged into other financial products without each platform rebuilding custody and settlement from scratch.

Those pieces are also starting to come together. Stablecoins put cash onchain. Wallets, exchanges and DeFi protocols have matured. Retail-facing trading platforms like Robinhood (HOOD), Coinbase (COIN) and others bring distribution. And regulators – in the U.S. and around the globe – are beginning to give tokenized securities a clearer path into markets.

Why this is a big deal

Citrini isn't discovering tokenization. Crypto-native investors have talked about real-world assets (RWA) for years.

What's different is seeing a widely followed research shop outside the crypto bubble translate the thesis into the language that large investors care about most: where do you actually make money?

That isn't as obvious as it sounds.

Citrini argued that tokenization could lift the broader crypto ecosystem, but more assets moving onchain doesn't automatically make bitcoin BTC$81,577.53, ether ETH$2,406.49 or whichever blockchain hosts them the best trade.

Arthur Hayes, BitMEX's co-founder and the chief investment officer of Maelstrom, framed that problem more bluntly.

RWA tokenization has been talked about for a decade, he said in a recent interview with The Rollup, and simply taking a security that already sits in a digital database and recording it somewhere else doesn't necessarily create much value.

“Okay, doing better bookkeeping. Thank you,” Hayes said. “Where are you actually going to make money in tokenization?”

There are several possible answers.

Tokenized stocks can generate issuance fees, trading revenue, stablecoin demand, lending activity and collateral usage, but those economics can land in very different places.

Christian Magoon, CEO of Amplify ETFs, which runs the tokenization-focused TKNQ fund, thinks infrastructure providers could become “toll booths on the blockchain toll roads,” while distribution may be just as valuable: Coinbase, Robinhood, banks and wealth platforms who already have the customer relationships.

Jeff Dorman, CIO of investment firm Arca, told CoinDesk he expects the actual tokenization process to become increasingly commoditized as competition grows.

The stickier economics, he said, emerge after an asset is onchain: when it starts trading, being lent out or serving as collateral to borrow. That's why he sees potential beneficiaries ranging from Securitize (SECZ) to crypto protocols such as blockchain-based trading venue Hyperliquid, decentralized lender Aave AAVE$156.04 and decentralized exchange Aerodrome (AERO).

Zach Pandl, head of digital asset research at Grayscale, told CoinDesk the simpler bet may be the networks underneath all of it.

"The most direct way to position a portfolio for the tokenization megatrend is to own the networks that host RWAs and process transactions," he said. "The industry leaders today are Ethereum ETH$2,406.49, BNB Chain BNB$714.36, and Solana (SOL)"

Other networks could carve out different roles. Avalanche (AVAX) and Canton CC$0.1046, for example, have taken more institutionally focused approaches to handling tokenized assets and could see increasing demand as banks and asset managers move more activity onchain, he said.

And that's where Hayes sees an even bigger story that could make tokenization much more than better bookkeeping: AI agents running financial services.

“I think the best story I want to tell is that AI agents will run all of your financial services,” Hayes said.

Think of software continuously rebalancing your portfolio, moving idle cash toward higher yields, finding a cheaper loan or shifting collateral as market conditions change. Those agents would need money and investments they can access programmatically, around the clock, without a human clicking through each transaction.

That happens to look a lot like the infrastructure crypto has spent years building: programmable assets, always-on markets, smart-contract lending and near-instant settlement.

Citrini landed on a similar argument, saying tokenized assets effectively translate financial products into a machine-native format that AI agents can work with.

Still, there is plenty of room for those winners to change. Amplify’s Magoon stressed that the market remains “extremely early,” with tokenized assets still tiny compared with global financial markets.

“The long runway ahead increases the likelihood that future winners may differ from today's leaders,” he said.