Tokenized Financial Assets to Reach $2 Trillion by 2030 as On-Chain Money Movement Takes Hold [EastPoint: Seoul 2026]

Lee Jong-sub, Professor at Seoul National University’s College of Business Administration

Change in capital markets usually begins quietly. Before investors notice it, the first shifts tend to occur in the less visible parts of finance, such as payments, settlement, collateral and custody.

That is what is happening in on-chain capital markets today. The market remains focused on prices, but the more important shift is in how money and assets move. Financial institutions are redesigning the infrastructure through which assets are issued and settled. In my view, that shift will define the next phase of finance.

For a time, blockchain was largely seen as a technology for issuing new tokens. The recent trend is different. The market has now moved into a phase in which existing capital-market infrastructure is being transferred on-chain.

Efforts to handle traditional financial assets on blockchain are accelerating. Those assets include US Treasuries, money market funds, private credit and deposit-like instruments. This is not simply a matter of turning paper documents into digital files. It represents a fundamental change in the timetable and operating model of financial transactions.

The numbers already show the direction of travel. McKinsey projects the market for tokenized financial assets will reach $2 trillion by 2030. That figure excludes the fast-growing stablecoin market. Even on a conservative basis, it suggests traditional financial products such as bonds, funds, loans and exchange-traded products could move on-chain in large numbers.

The clearest growth has come in tokenized US Treasuries. Digital-asset data firm RWA.xyz says that market has recently grown to $15 billion. Large asset managers including BlackRock and Franklin Templeton have led the expansion. That suggests institutional on-chain experiments are evolving into actual asset management.

Global financial firms are also changing their approach. BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are drawing institutional investors with tokenized digital money market funds. JPMorgan, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs are testing deposit tokens, collateral transfers and settlement infrastructure for security token offerings, or STOs. Going a step further, distributed-ledger repos using tokenized Treasuries as collateral are also spreading. Real-time, or T+0, transfers of collateral ownership have made intraday repos with maturities of less than a day possible. That removes a bottleneck that once tied up lending until settlement was completed. If blockchain was once an experiment for new-business teams, it is now being treated as core infrastructure for payments, settlement and liquidity management.

Why now? Technology trends alone do not fully explain it. Legacy financial infrastructure still has long-standing bottlenecks. Cross-border securities settlement is slow. Liquidity in private markets is limited. Collateral transfers must pass through multiple intermediaries. Trades may be executed instantly on screen, but the actual transfer of rights and settlement still follow separate processes. On-chain infrastructure is intended to narrow that gap.

In that process, settlement assets take on a bigger role. If tokenized Treasuries and funds are to move, they need a stable settlement instrument on the other side. Stablecoins and tokenized deposits are becoming central pillars of that structure.

Tokenization is not only about cutting costs. It also opens new revenue opportunities. Institutions can trade tokenized assets around the clock and use them as collateral, allowing idle assets to turn over more quickly. Fractional ownership can draw new investors into assets that were previously hard to access, such as private credit and real estate. For asset managers, that lowers barriers to entry for products and broadens the fee base.

The next stage of competition will not depend on which assets have been tokenized. More important will be the settlement networks and custody structures tied to those assets, and the institutional networks they connect to. Institutional businesses function only when settlement, collateral, custody, accounting and disclosure all work together. The decisive factor in on-chain capital markets is not technical perfection. It is how deeply the system is integrated into the operating processes of financial institutions.

I see this as the full-fledged start of on-chain money movement. Putting assets on blockchain is not enough. What matters is whether those assets can move properly within actual financial operations.

Regulatory discussions are moving in the same direction. Major jurisdictions including the US, Japan and the European Union are spelling out how digital assets can be incorporated into mainstream finance. South Korea is also discussing the institutionalization of security tokens, won-denominated stablecoins and custody infrastructure for institutions. The question now is no longer whether blockchain is needed in finance. It is who will build a business model that works first within the regulated system.

There is no shortage of tasks ahead. The legal relationship between tokens and the underlying rights must be clarified. Investor protection, disclosure, accounting treatment and security standards must also become more sophisticated. Custody rules and internal-control standards are prerequisites for institutional participation. Still, the fact that these discussions are now under way matters in itself. It shows on-chain capital markets are moving beyond experiments at the edge of finance and deeper into the mainstream system.

The center of gravity in the digital-asset industry is shifting. It is moving away from exchange-led price competition toward competition over capital-market infrastructure, and away from token issuance toward system-level competition to redesign how institutions manage assets. On-chain money movement is still in its early stages. But the direction is clear. Financial institutions and countries that fail to get on board may find themselves seeking a late seat in infrastructure built by others.

Lee Jong-sub, Professor at Seoul National University’s College of Business Administration