Author: Jason Jiang

From Bitcoin spot ETF to tokenization wave, represented by Wall Street Institutional power is profoundly affecting and changing the direction of the crypto market, and we believe this power will become even more powerful in 2025. OKG Research has launched a series of studies on "#chainWall Street" to continue to pay attention to the innovation and practice of traditional institutions in the field of Web3. How do top institutions such as BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase embrace innovation? How will tokenized assets, on-chain payments and decentralized finance shape the future financial landscape?

This article is the first in a series of studies on "#chainWall Street".

When predicting the crypto market in 2025, investment management company VanEck boldly predicted that Coinbase would "take the unprecedented step of delegating its shares to monetized and deployed on its Base blockchain." The prophecy seems to be coming true: Jesse Pollak, the main developer of the Base chain, recently revealed that providing $Coin on the Base chain is “something we are looking into in the new year” and expects that “every asset in the world will eventually be in Base".

We don't yet know whether Coinbase can realize its plan, but when it uses its own stocks as a starting point for tokenization exploration, Wall Street is also accelerating "Onchain."

Wall Street begins to migrate to the chain

From 2024 to the present, the encryption market has experienced rapid growth, and the boundaries of innovation have continued to expand. The core driving force behind this comes from the cryptocurrency spot ETF promoted by Wall Street institutions represented by BlackRock. Today, these institutions are turning more attention to the area of ​​tokenization.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said that while the approval of crypto spot ETFs is important, these are steps towards wider tokenization of other assets. "Stepping Stone". Riding on the tokenization boom, Wall Street is pushing for more assets and businesses to be put on the chain, allowing traditional finance and crypto innovation to collide in the digital space.

Although tokenization of financial assets has been happening since 2017, but only recently took off like crazy. Unlike early exploration that focused on permissioned chains, more and more tokenization practices are converging on public chains, and Ethereum has become the first choice for institutional tokenization. These institutions no longer reject decentralization, but instead actively explore the radius of crypto influence, trying to provide new experiences through the recombination of assets and technology. As Coinbase said, "Web3" is gradually being replaced by the more appropriate "Onchain".

Only this time, the protagonist is no longer just cryptocurrencies, but also many assets from the physical world, such as stocks. As the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, Coinbase is the most popular stock target in the tokenization market at this stage. rwa.xyz data shows that as of January 2025, the total market value of tokenized stocks is approximately US$12.55 million, of which nearly 50% are tokenized stocks with Coinbase as the target. In addition, stock tokens such as Nvidia, Tesla and Apple among the seven largest American technology stocks also frequently appear on the chain.

Illustration of the market structure of tokenized stocks

Coinbase plans to tokenize its stocks and issue them on the Base chain, which will not only allow investors to trade their stocks directly on the chain, but also further integrate the trading platform, Base chain and on-chain asset ecology, and explore the opportunities in the United States The compliant and implementable stock tokenization model enables it to stay ahead in the competition of crypto-financial innovation.

This layout must not be just for $COIN tokenization. Perhaps as Jesse Pollak said, they hope that all assets in the world will be on the Base chain. But in comparison, a more foreseeable future is to accelerate the migration of major global assets to the chain through tokenization.

Although tokenization, like other innovative concepts, has been criticized, the idea centered on democratizing access to investment opportunities and simplifying the efficiency of capital flow has been Deeply rooted in people's hearts. The on-chain usability demonstrated by stablecoins, BUIDL funds and other tokenized assets has proven its worth, and more and more asset classes are migrating on-chain: not only the usual private credit, bonds, funds and gold; There are assets such as agricultural products, carbon points, and rare minerals.

According to the prediction of Ouke Cloud Chain Research Institute, in 2025 we will see Wall Street continue to "Onchain" frequently and promote the tokenization system to be richer and more mature. : Not only will the scale of tokenized assets on the non-stable currency chain exceed at least US$30 billion,Yuan, we will also see more companies enter the field of tokenization under the leadership of Wall Street and bring more valuable assets to the chain. While the scale of tokenization of these assets may not be “exaggerated,” it is still significant.

Towards a more democratic future of finance

60 years ago, when you bought finance Securities may be used as collateral, and it may take five days to receive paper vouchers before the transaction can be confirmed; later, as the number of paper vouchers increased, transaction settlement became unmanageable, forcing Wall Street to begin trying to use computers to track securities.

Today, gaining a competitive trading advantage from better or faster technology is a ubiquitous part of modern finance. Whether it is BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, almost everyone on Wall Street believes that tokenization is the future trend and is embracing the changes brought about by tokenization. Compared with the passiveness of financial informatization, tokenization is the next step of change that finance actively embraces.

In this revolution, deploying assets to the chain through tokenization is no longer a problem. The challenge in the future is how to increase the demand for tokenized assets. , thereby solving the liquidity problem on the chain. The unparalleled success of traditional securities is largely due to their high liquidity and low transaction costs. If tokenized assets are simply locked on the chain or can only be found in secondary markets with limited liquidity, their actual value will also be Very limited.

Nadine Chakar, who once managed the digital asset department of State Street Bank, once expressed a similar view, "The bank cooperates with a company to issue tokenized bonds. , and then issue a press release. What happens next? These bonds are like rocks and difficult to circulate in the market."

How to solve the liquidity problem of tokenized markets? Different institutions may have different plans, but in my opinion the most direct way is to accelerate the tokenization of high-quality assets. Only by accumulating enough high-quality assets on the chain can we attract more users and funds to migrate to the chain, thereby solving the liquidity problem.

McKinsey predicts that the scale of tokenization will be close to US$2 trillion by 2030

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Tokenization is now moving from pilots to large-scale deployment as network effects increase. However, as McKinsey predicts, tokenization cannot happen overnight, unlikeThere will be a clear time lag in the tokenization of assets: the first wave will be driven by use cases with proven return on investment and existing scale, followed by technologies that currently have smaller markets, less obvious benefits, or need to solve more severe problems Use cases for challenging asset classes.

When the first wave of on-chain assets explores compliant and practical business models and brings sufficient attention and liquidity to the on-chain market, it may represent Monetization will create a freer and more democratic “shadow” capital market in the future. Giving investors freer investment opportunities and allowing more companies to complete financing more conveniently, tokenization will bring profound changes to both asset supply and demand sides, and gradually eliminate the barriers between the off-chain and on-chain worlds, forming a truly global New financial ecology.