Building the New Rails of Global Finance

An article we liked from Thought Leader Jason Rosenthal of a16z crypto:

Exchanges won’t build the next layer of finance. Founders will.

Core financial plumbing is starting to be rebuilt onchain.

Wall Street isn’t just exploring blockchain anymore. It’s migrating to it.

After years on the sidelines, the institutions that form the backbone of global capital markets — exchanges, clearinghouses, and electronic trading platforms — are moving onchain.

What’s happening right now is the largest infrastructure upgrade in capital markets since the shift to electronic trading thirty years ago.

But most people won’t recognize this shift until it’s already done.

Why now: Velocity changes everything

Every institution moving in this direction believes the same thing — that onchain infrastructure will dramatically increase the velocity of money. History is unambiguous about what that produces.

Think about what electronic trading did in the 1990s: Before ECNs and online brokerages, a trade took minutes to execute, spreads were priced in fractions, and access was gated by geography and capital. Then the infrastructure changed. Spreads collapsed. Commissions fell from $150 to $9.95 to zero. Volume exploded. Retail participation surged. The markets of the 2000s were unrecognizable from those of the 1990s — not just cheaper, but vastly larger.

Tokenization applies that same logic to the entire global financial stack: 24/7 markets, instant settlement, seamless cross-border distribution, fractionalization of assets previously locked behind six-figure minimums, collateral that moves in real time instead of sitting idle overnight. More velocity. More participation. Bigger pie.

But what does tokenization actually mean? A tokenized asset is a digital representation of a real-world asset (RWA) — a Treasury bond, a share of Apple, a real estate deed — recorded on a blockchain as a programmable token. Instead of…