Big Ideas 2026: Tokenized Assets

Added: 2026-06-10

[00:00:00]Hi everyone. My name is Lorenzo. I'm the director of research of digital assets at ARK Invest. And this year in Big Ideas 2026, we're going to go over tokenized assets. So, this year with the GENIUS Act in June of 2025, it has been really the biggest piece of legislation in crypto regulating stablecoins.

[00:00:23]And so, what we have seen after this is really every institution, fintech, bank, or cross-border payment company develop a stablecoin or tokenization strategy. And what we've seen is now many announcements. JP Morgan has announced the the JP Morgan uh deposit token, money market. We have seen companies like Klarna, Western Union launch their own stablecoins. And even big tech companies such as Stripe wanting to develop their own infrastructure and launching a a layer one a purpose-built for for payments.

[00:01:08]In the second slide, it's really the the adoption of of stablecoins reaching an all-time high in 2025. And now in December doing 3.5 trillion of of volume. So, to put this into perspective, this is more than 40 trillion in annual volume, more than Visa, MasterCard, and and and just payments in remittances payments in general. We believe that is going to continue to grow with more more adoption in cross-border payments, treasury managements, and just consumer all over the world.

[00:01:45]So, the tokenized assets market has been really the the fastest markets in crypto this year. We have seen tremendous growth uh from US Treasuries um mainly uh for you know, crypto companies and and and on-chain users wanted to get to the to the risk-free rate.

[00:02:09]Um and then commodities, right? Like we have just seen uh for the past uh 3-4 months the rise in in gold price. And so, uh with tokenized gold and and other metals, there they those have been really the two markets that have grown uh um the the fastest. And so, they've reached 19 billion uh at the end of of this year and we continue that's going to we think that's going to continue to accelerate over time.

[00:02:35]Um we uh so, this slide really is about uh uh liquidity and and capital on on the layer ones and we wanted to focus on where are these assets actually sitting, right? And so, if we uh if we look at um you know, the top seven, eight layer ones, um Ethereum really remains uh the the the on-chain hub for tokenized assets and and native assets, right? So, what we see really in this slide is uh we counted the top 50 native tokens and then uh stablecoins, meme coins, RWAs, Treasuries and and NFTs. So, really like all the assets that sit on these ledgers. And Ethereum has more than 400 billion uh right now and and and has more assets than all the rest of the the L1s combined.

[00:03:29]So, the this is our um our model for uh tokenized assets. We wanted to um you know, model the growth basically of the of the tokenized asset market and um you know, stripping down really um the the market for global equities, the sovereign debt, the bank deposits, venture capital, and uh and uh private equity, for example. And with an adoption curve, we, you know, we think the the tokenized market uh could grow to 11 trillion in in 2030. And most of that would be um global public equities and and sovereign debt.

[00:04:11]This is again uh really seeing the um the world from crypto natives and TradFi um uh colliding and really merging together. We have seen, you know, exchanges and financial institutions not only launching products and assets on on blockchains, but really starting to develop uh and launch their own infrastructure, right? And so, in this chart, we've seen the adoption of the Coinbase uh Bitcoin back loans uh that are using a Morpho, which is a which is a a modular uh money market on Ethereum.

[00:04:43]And then Robinhood, which obviously has announced the launch of the layer twos and has uh tokenized stocks on them. And so, we've seen the the the the growth of that over the over the last year.