# Tokenized Assets > [!note] Disambiguation > This page is about **financial** tokenization: recording ownership of a stock, bond, fund share or bank deposit as a token on a blockchain. For how AI language models split text into "tokens," see [[Tokenization]]. A **tokenized asset** is an ordinary financial asset whose ownership record lives on a [[Blockchain]] (or another distributed ledger) instead of only in a traditional registrar's database. The asset itself doesn't change: a tokenized Treasury bill is still a Treasury bill. What changes is the plumbing. The token can move between wallets at any hour, settle almost instantly, be split into fractions, and carry rules written as [[Smart Contract]]s. People in the industry often call these "real-world assets" (RWAs), to distinguish them from native crypto like [[Bitcoin]]. Avoid that abbreviation in this vault: RWA also stands for Right-Wing Authoritarianism (see the [[RWA Scale]]). ## The settlement-asset problem A tokenized trade has two legs: the asset and the cash that pays for it. Tokenizing the asset is the easy part. The live political and regulatory fight is over **what the cash leg is made of**. There are three candidates: | Settlement asset | Who issues it | Example | |---|---|---| | **Private [[Stablecoin]]** | A private company holding reserves | Dollar stablecoins licensed under the US [[GENIUS Act]] | | **Tokenized bank deposit** | A commercial bank, as a token of its own deposits | Bank deposit-token projects (credit risk sits with the bank) | | **Central-bank money** | A central bank | The [[European Central Bank]]'s [[Pontes]], live September 21, 2026 | The US and the euro area have placed opposite bets. Washington licensed private stablecoins and then barred the [[Federal Reserve]] from issuing a [[CBDC]] until December 31, 2030 (see [[21st Century ROAD to Housing Act]]). Frankfurt built Pontes so that tokenized European markets settle in central-bank euros, with [[Appia]] as the long-term blueprint. ## Key moments | Date | Event | |---|---| | March 20, 2024 | [[BlackRock]] launches **BUIDL** (USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) on Ethereum, with Securitize as transfer agent: a tokenized fund holding cash, Treasury bills and repos, open only to qualified investors with a $5 million minimum | | July 1, 2025 | The [[European Central Bank]] approves its dual-track plan ([[Pontes]] and [[Appia]]) to settle tokenized transactions in central-bank money | | March 11, 2026 | Eurosystem publishes the [[Appia]] roadmap | | September 17, 2026 | The [[SEC]] under [[Paul Atkins]] issues a five-year conditional "innovation exemption" letting tokenized versions of US-listed stocks trade on blockchain-based venues | | September 21, 2026 | [[Pontes]] goes live: 13 banks and 4 platform operators settle tokenized trades in central-bank euros | ## The SEC's innovation exemption (September 17, 2026) The exemptive order (Exchange Act Release No. 34-106402) lets tokenized versions of US-listed stocks trade on blockchain-based venues using automated market makers and liquidity pools, outside the traditional exchange framework. It runs five years, to September 17, 2031. Conditions reported across sources: - Tokens must carry the **same economic and voting rights** as the underlying shares. Synthetic look-alikes are excluded. - Third-party tokenizers must give the issuing company **30 days' notice**, and the company can object. - Trading is capped at small fractions of each stock's normal volume (0.25% or 2.5% of average daily volume depending on tier, per Sidley's summary of the order). Atkins called it a bridge that must be "followed by durable rulemaking." That is the vault's standing caveat on the [[Crypto-Political Machine]]: an exemption issued by one commission can be withdrawn by the next. ## Why it's in this vault - **The money is incumbent finance, not crypto insurgents.** [[Larry Fink]] has promoted tokenization in his annual chairman's letters, and [[BlackRock]] put a tokenized Treasury fund on a public blockchain in 2024. Tokenization is where Wall Street and the crypto industry's political project converge. - **Promises versus delivery.** [[World Liberty Financial]] listed tokenized Treasuries and equities on its roadmap. As of September 2026 they were still unshipped (tracked in the World Liberty Financial News Log). - **The control question again.** The [[CBDC]] page's point applies here too: the fight is less about the technology than about *who issues the money on the rails*. ## See Also - [[Pontes]] — the ECB's central-bank-money settlement bridge for tokenized trades - [[Appia]] — the ECB's long-term tokenized-finance roadmap - [[Stablecoin]] — the private settlement asset the US chose - [[CBDC]] — central-bank digital money, retail and wholesale - [[Smart Contract]] — the code that carries a token's rules - [[Tokenization]] — the unrelated AI sense of the word