Stablecoins such as Tether have seen market capitalisation increases of about 20x from April 2020 to date. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month BlackRock CEO Larry Fink made an unusually candid declaration. “The movement towards tokenisation and decimalisation is necessary,” he told the assembled global elite, arguing that markets should run on “one common blockchain”. Meanwhile, in Washington President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025, establishing America’s first comprehensive framework for stablecoins.
These are not isolated events. They are strategic moves in a high-stakes contest to determine who will control the plumbing of global finance for the next century. Tokenisation — converting assets such as stocks, bonds and real estate into digital tokens on a blockchain that trade instantly, globally, around the clock. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, a tokenised money market product, has accumulated more than $2.8bn in assets. According to Ripple and Boston Consulting Group, blockchain tokenisation could reach $19-trillion by 2033.
This is not speculation. It is infrastructure being built in real time. Tokenisation does not merely make trading faster; it restructures who controls financial infrastructure. Asset managers already control the assets. Tokenisation allows them to control the rails as well and whoever builds those rails will see every transaction in real time.
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