Wall Street's tokenization boom could have bigger winners than bitcoin and ether, Citrini says

We have spent the last decade arguing about the price of Bitcoin. We have spent the last five arguing about the utility of Ethereum. While we were distracted by candle charts and Twitter wars, the traditional finance world finally figured out what they actually want from this technology. It is not a new currency. It is a more efficient way to move the old ones.

A recent shift in sentiment from major research firms like Citrini highlights a reality that founders need to face: the biggest financial winners of the next cycle might not be the people holding the underlying tokens. Instead, the gains are flowing toward the platforms that facilitate the movement of tokenized stocks, bonds, and private loans. For a builder, this changes everything about where you should be putting your energy.

The infrastructure flip

For a long time, the thesis was simple. If the world adopts blockchain, Bitcoin goes up. If the world builds on blockchain, Ether goes up. That was a store-of-value play. But Wall Street does not play for stores of value; they play for volume and fees. They are looking at the plumbing of the global financial system and realizing it is archaic. Settlement times are too slow, and the overhead of managing private credit or real estate is too high.

The move toward tokenizing real-world assets (RWA) is no longer a fringe experiment. We are seeing a boom in tokenized treasuries and institutional-grade lending products. But here is the catch: these institutions do not necessarily care if the price of the native gas token doubles. They care about the fee-generating potential of the platform they are using to trade these assets. This creates a massive opportunity for startups that focus on the interface between legacy finance and on-chain liquidity.

Why fee-generators beat store-of-value

In a volatile market, holding a volatile asset is a gamble. But in a volatile market, the house always wins because the house collects a fee on every trade regardless of which way the price moves. This is the Citrini thesis in a nutshell. As Wall Street brings trillions of dollars in bonds and equity onto the chain, the companies providing the regulatory-compliant rails, the identity layers, and the automated market makers are the ones with sustainable business models.

As a founder, you have to ask yourself if you are building a product that relies on people liking a specific token, or if you are building a product that people are forced to use because it makes their existing business cheaper. The latter is where the institutional money is landing. They want to tokenize a loan portfolio, clip a coupon, and have the settlement happen instantly without a room full of back-office lawyers. If you build the tool that replaces those lawyers, you have a business that survives a bear market.

The private credit explosion

One of the most overlooked aspects of this tokenization boom is private credit. Traditionally, this was a gated world. If you wanted to lend money to a mid-sized corporation or participate in a massive real estate development, you needed to be in the room. Tokenization breaks those assets into smaller, liquid pieces. It creates a secondary market for debt that never existed before.

This is where the "bigger winners" come in. It is not just about the asset itself; it is about the liquidity. When you can trade a fraction of a corporate bond as easily as you can trade a meme coin, the velocity of capital increases. The platforms that manage that velocity—the ones that handle the compliance, the distributions, and the secondary trading—are positioned to become the new gatekeepers of the financial world.

A reality check for builders

I see a lot of founders still trying to build the "next big L1" or a new governance token for a DAO that does not have a revenue stream. That era is closing. The new era is about integration. Wall Street does not want to learn how to use a cold wallet. They want an API that connects their existing ledger to a blockchain so they can save 200 basis points on operational costs.

If you are building in AI and crypto, the intersection is even more potent. Automated risk assessment for tokenized loans, AI-driven compliance monitoring for cross-border asset transfers, and smart contracts that self-execute based on real-world data feeds are the tools that will get funded. The skepticism I have always held for "crypto for crypto's sake" is finally being validated by the market's pivot toward tangible utility.

The regulatory hurdle

We cannot talk about Wall Street tokenization without talking about the elephant in the room: regulation. The winners in this space will not be the ones moving fast and breaking things. They will be the ones moving at the speed of the law. The institutional boom requires a level of transparency and reporting that the early crypto movement fought against. But that is the price of entry for the trillions of dollars currently sitting on the sidelines.

Building for this environment means prioritizing security audits, legal frameworks, and interoperability over hype. You need to be thinking about how your protocol interacts with a centralized bank's digital currency or a regulated stablecoin. The days of the isolated ecosystem are over. Everything is going to be connected, and the connectors are the ones who will capture the value.

The Founder's Takeaway

Stop chasing the next pump in asset prices and start looking at the friction points in traditional finance. If you can use blockchain to remove a middleman from a bond trade or a stock settlement, you are building something with institutional gravity. The real winners of the tokenization boom aren't the ones holding the bags—they are the ones who built the conveyor belt.

Read the original at CoinDesk →