Now Main Street, Not Wall St, Is Rejecting Tokenization

ISSUE #14 · October 22, 2026 · By Michael Casey

Welcome to the RWA Rundown, episode 14.

Corporate America doesn’t like its shares being tokenized — at least not in the manner that New York Stock Exchange owner ICE and its crypto platform partner OKX are doing it under the SEC’s new “innovation exemption.”

The lead story in The Digest this week reveals a Who’s Who of U.S. public companies — Microsoft, Alphabet, Qualcomm, Caterpillar, McDonald’s, Western Digital, Broadcom, Verizon, UnitedHealth and Goldman Sachs, among others — objecting to tokenized versions of their shares trading on the new OKX-ICE joint venture platform.

One concern seems to surround the legal uncertainty. Since the SEC exemption from filing requirements is grounded in a rule independently written by the Commission and not based in legislation – which the failed CLARITY Act was supposed to address — there’s a fear that it could be overturned by a new SEC under a change of government in two years’ time.

I imagine there is generally also corporate fear of losing control of the share registry, though this should be addressed by the on-chain data and custody models embraced by NYSE and others.

It’s also striking that Nasdaq, which is launching its own tokenized share trading platform, has objected to its own shares being tokenized in this way — though this could well be due to its exchange not being listed as an aggregated records partner in the OKX-ICE project. Having Goldman Sachs, which is also experimenting with tokenization in various forms, in the mix is also telling.

Still, this time it’s less about the resistance to decentralized finance from traditional finance and more about mainstream corporations digging their heels in. Is this just an education issue? An image/reputation problem for crypto? Or does the industry need to make fundamental changes to the prevailing real-world asset model before both Wall Street and Main Street can confidently join the party?

If you ask Subhankar Sinha, however, the juice from harmonizing tokenized stocks might not be worth the squeeze. In A Conversation With, the senior advisor to Luxembourg-based STOKR talks about the huge potential for creating cross-border capital flow efficiencies to everyone’s benefit. But the gains, he says, will come on the cash side of the equation, through stablecoins, not on the asset side. Have a read of these provocative comments from one of our other Real-World Asset Summit speakers, below the Digest.

The Digest

SEC tokenized stock framework faces issuer pushback as Broadcom, Verizon object to OKX-ICE listing

One gets the sense a major problem with the SEC’s innovation exemption is that it was rushed through without sufficient consultation with stakeholders. Recall that the SEC was about to announce it back in August, but was talked out of it by crypto allies on Capitol Hill who thought a unilateral rule by the SEC that was seen as pre-empting Congress might work against the CLARITY vote. Then, once it was clear that CLARITY didn’t have the votes to pass, the SEC went ahead anyway. On both sides, it just shows how much crypto policymaking in the U.S. has been undermined by a failure to build broad coalitions behind it. Instead, there is a reversion to rule by fiat. Whether it was the prior SEC’s “regulation by enforcement” against crypto or the current SEC’s pro-crypto unilateral rulemaking, it breeds resentment from the other side, makes consensus harder to achieve, undermines trust and, ultimately, works against the very spirit of decentralization.

OKX-ICE co-chair Andrew Cuomo calls corporate objections a ‘natural response’ to tokenized stock plans

The industry response to the companies’ concerns seems to be very much one of “we hear you.” But underneath these sympathetic comments – from new OKX-ICE Chairman Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor, and others from Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo, for example — is a hint that it’s all just about “education.” Once we explain this to the issuers they’ll understand. I’m not so sure about that. I think this is about control. There has to be an alignment of interests between the existing management, the platforms and exchanges rushing to boost transaction turnover, and the existing and future shareholders of the public companies. How do we make it so that everybody wins in the long run?

DTCC prepares to tokenize $30 trillion in assets across 25 securities

Meanwhile, there’s a sense that tokenization is inevitable, regardless. The DTCC is the most important player in that inevitability, because it provides the capital market plumbing into which banks, brokerages, custodians, transfer agents and exchanges must plug. Once the reality of 24/7 trading and blockchain-based collateral trades is entrenched at the DTCC, it’s thought that the financial institutions that make up its members will join the party. The question, though, is whether Corporate America wants in. And there, the follow-on question is whether tokenization makes startups more or less willing to launch public listings. And if they don’t want to, can they control the tokenization of their private shares?

OCC Finalizes Stablecoin Issuer Rules Ahead of Jan. 18 Deadline

Meanwhile, where crypto reforms did take the Congressional approval path – the GENIUS Act on stablecoins, which passed last year and was seen at the time to be a precursor for CLARITY — regulators are moving forward with legislation-mandated changes. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which garnered a lot more regulatory clout under GENIUS, seems to be especially eager to push the federal bank charters into the crypto era.

Ondo’s Tokenized Treasury Product Just Passed BlackRock’s BUIDL. Is ONDO Undervalued?

What’s interesting about this story is not just that Ondo is taking on the biggest asset manager in the world but what it says about tokenomics generally. So many crypto projects experience a similar disconnect between the price of the governance token and the revenue earned by the lab or company that’s driving the project. The assumption has always been that the general growth of the network will drive the value of the token, but what if the money being made by Ondo Finance doesn’t have the equivalent increase in network activity and token transactions? This is why I’ve long felt that the best model of governance includes a dedicated token buy-back fund that’s tied to revenue. That has been proposed in Ondo’s case. Unclear if it will get through.

BlackRock Sees Tokenized Funds Moving Into Wall Street Plumbing

Meanwhile, Ondo’s competitor, BlackRock has its eyes on the real prize. If a tokenized fund can be used to secure short-term loans in the $13 trillion repurchase securities (repo) market, where financial institutions post securities as collateral to raise money for their intraday cash needs, the demand for the BUIDL token could skyrocket.

Subhankar Sinha is a digital assets expert and startup advisor working to expand access to high-quality financial assets and investment strategies. He advises STOKR on fund tokenization, especially for cash management and income-generating products and strategies. He previously served as Head of Blockchain at BNY, and as a Director at PwC, where he co-founded and co-led the firm’s blockchain practice in the US.

Q: You argue the tokenization industry is focused on the wrong problem. What do you mean?

A: When we think about tokenization, we lump the cash and the asset sides together, and that’s neither implementable nor digestible. Service providers can’t wrap their minds around it.

Look at what Mastercard, Visa and the payment networks are doing with stablecoins. That’s really smart. They’re using stablecoins as just another currency. A credit card transaction has two sides, the issuer side and the acquirer side, and the card networks have figured out they can use stablecoins on either side. Take a merchant in Argentina or Nigeria who wants to get paid in local currency. Today they get paid through banking channels, and that cross-border payment has multiple hops, delays and fees. If the acquirer can accept stablecoins, boom, they’re settled instantly. Then the acquirer can pass the stablecoin to the merchants and the merchants can go to an exchange and off-ramp whenever they want. If they don’t want to off-ramp, they can just hold their USDC.

This concept of using stablecoin as another currency hasn’t crossed over into the tokenization conversation. The payments people have figured out how to use stablecoins to make things better for their clients. The traditional capital-markets service providers haven’t. Yet most of the friction in buying something comes from the cash leg, not the asset leg. And that’s the opportunity for a regulated tokenization platform, like STOKR – as the stablecoin market continues to grow globally, the target market for tokenized assets grows with it. So my latest thinking is this: don’t think about the asset leg when you think about the problem you’re solving. You’re solving the cash-leg problem.

Q: Where does that friction show up for an investor outside the US or Europe?

A: Say I’m a Filipino or Indian investor. Leaving government regulations aside, I want to buy a fund that’s offered internationally, maybe a US fund with a feeder fund out of the Cayman Islands, or a Luxembourg fund. Service providers today cater to high-value, high-ticket private fund investors, because that’s where the effort makes sense. There’s the KYC effort, and that Southeast Asian or LatAm investor’s bank has to work through correspondent banks. Subscriptions, redemptions, capital calls and distributions all go in and out through a series of banks, so every one of them is a cross-border payment. The time service providers spend on reconciliation and error correction in the cash leg is insane. With so many hops, it often isn’t worth letting those investors in, even when the fund is available globally.

Over the last 15 years, a lot of the large global correspondent banks have left many corridors. If the direct corridor from the US to, say, Paraguay is closed, a Paraguayan bank has to come in through a hop via Brazil. For the global bank, that corridor is no longer profitable. With the cost of transaction monitoring, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, and the effort of squeezing is mostly regulatory. So when I say international investors can’t access high-quality US and European assets for regulatory reasons, people think I’m promoting regulatory arbitrage. I’m not. The banks have left. At the end of the day, the transfer agent holds the investor records anyway. The assets aren’t really moving. The issue is how investors send money to the transfer agent and how the transfer agent sends it back.

Today a regulated tokenization platform, like STOKR, can, in theory, directly KYC an investor from almost anywhere in the world and handle the travel rule. As long as that investor is willing to pay in a regulated stablecoin, they can get in. You’re not going through five hops of banks. If you can convert your local currency to USDC and you clear KYC, you’re in. The barrier drops precipitously.

It matters even more as payouts get more frequent. Money market funds accrue dividends daily, and now people are talking about hourly. Imagine sending a daily payout in cash (as some assets do) to somebody in Argentina. If you pay 10 or 20 basis points every time you move the money and your annualized yield is 12%, the transaction costs eat the whole thing. All these fixed-income assets end up completely underwater.

Q: Couldn’t blockchains also fix the asset side, the property-rights problem Hernando de Soto wrote about in The Mystery of Capital?

A: A tokenized asset is not a bearer asset. The issuer is responsible for maintaining an investor record, either directly or through a transfer agent, and the transfer agent uses a blockchain instead of a database or paper. Somebody is still responsible for that record, and sanctions will still be enforced.

I keep going back to Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital. I recommended that book to someone just today. The legal structure in the US and in places like Luxembourg and Switzerland is so trusted that you know the asset is there and protected. A few months ago I was talking to an eastern European central bank. They’ve done a lot of work on the cash side, on licensing. They want to build capital-markets infrastructure and compete, but they don’t yet have the robust legal infrastructure to protect investors against insolvency and other risks. When you talk about cross-border investment into emerging countries, the legal framework comes into the conversation immediately. It never comes up when you’re selling a US asset.

My father bought a piece of land in India in the early ’90s. Years after he passed away, my mother went to sell it and discovered it had been sold three times without our knowledge. Put that registry on a blockchain, fine. But a couple of weeks ago I was in Mallorca, and I learned that people can break into a house someone owns and start living there, and if the owner tries to evict them, the police come for the owner. No amount of putting the registry on a blockchain will solve that, because it goes to the core of property rights. If local enforcement doesn’t honor property rights, or a court takes five years to settle a case, that’s completely outside blockchain’s control.

Right now everybody and their uncle is in Venezuela buying oil rights, and there’s talk of tokenizing them. But those rights are ultimately in Venezuela, and the paradigm could shift right back two or three years from now. So if I tokenize them, at what discount will people buy? That’s the fundamental challenge, and blockchain doesn’t fix it at all.

Q: Making US assets easier to buy could draw capital, and monetary sovereignty, out of emerging markets. How do you see that?

A: I think about this a lot. To some extent I believe real pressure is needed for some governments to stop mucking around with the rule of law and get their act together. At the same time, global supply chains have broken down, and energy security and supply-chain security are real concerns now. A couple of weeks ago BlackRock’s weekly commentary said it’s now overweight emerging markets, specifically Asia excluding China, and Latin America, and it moved the US down to neutral.

A lot of capital investment is happening everywhere, particularly in defense. Countries like Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia don’t have big enough capital markets to finance what they’re spending on drones and other assets. Everybody is building their own energy infrastructure. That means a lot of redundancy in the world and a lot of capital moving from one place to another. So from a stablecoin perspective, I think dollar dominance will increase. But cross-border financing will increase too. Not all the dollars are going to come to the US.

India, for example, has created GIFT City. People compare it with Dubai and Singapore; I compare it with the Cayman Islands. It has a separate financial regulator, separate infrastructure and zero tax, and you can come in and go out in dollars. India is aggressively promoting it to attract dollar and euro investment for its growth, particularly in private credit. My one reservation is that it’s physically inside India, in the state of Gujarat, and still reports to the Ministry of Finance. It’s not a separate, friendly jurisdiction like Mauritius. But it’s a start, and I’m sure others, like Brazil and Turkey, are thinking the same way. Why are many countries building capital-markets infrastructure? Because they need external investment, and for that it needs the rule of law and the legal infrastructure.

There’s a through line, though. All currencies are network effects. If people distrust the strength of the network, no amount of financial engineering can keep the currency stable. And if there’s no trust in the economy, there won’t be trust in the assets coming out of it either. A country with that weakness will be at a continual disadvantage, both in attracting foreign investment in dollars and in managing its own currency. They’re two sides of the same coin. Blockchain won’t fix that, but it will force the issue. And I don’t believe tying yourself to an external anchor solves it. Political compulsion is domestic. Domestic affairs always drive fiscal and foreign policy, and any external commitment can be broken once internal turmoil gets high enough.

Q: Many people argue that stablecoins will drain deposits and collapse banking systems in emerging markets. You disagree.

A: Banks always try to spin this in their favor. They say deposit flight reduces their ability to lend. First, a deposit isn’t the bank’s asset. It’s a liability. And deposits don’t come first; lending comes first. A bank creates money by lending. The moment it makes a loan and credits an account, it has created money. That isn’t MMT. It’s standard and well established in central bank research. Banks like to claim otherwise because the argument works politically.

Say my sister in India converts part of her rupee savings into dollar stablecoin. It’s like buying gold: the dollar is a store of value compared with the rupee. But when she needs to pay her son’s school tuition, she converts that stablecoin back and probably gets more rupees for it. She still pays in rupees. A small business in India still pays in rupees and borrows from the bank in rupees. People aren’t going to borrow in stablecoins to finance working capital in local currency. And when she goes to the bank for a loan to buy another house, will the bank refuse because she moved some of her deposits? Of course not. It makes the loan, and in doing so creates more M1. So I don’t buy that deposit flight will collapse the banks, but it might increase funding costs for individual banks, especially if they are small and medium size. Banks made the same argument in the late 1970s and ’80s, when money market funds arrived. It’s a 40-plus-year-old argument from the banks. It’s not really about stablecoins.