Moody’s notes growing bank interest in tokenized assets

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Interest in tokenized assets

The trend is still weak

Despite optimism around the sector, Moody’s emphasized that current activity in tokenization remains relatively limited. The report states that cryptocurrency trading, cross-border retail payments, and several institutional use cases remain the main areas where blockchain-based finance is already being used at meaningful scale.

According to RWA.xyz, the tokenized real-world asset market has grown by more than 420% since the beginning of 2025 and reached $31.6 billion as of Thursday.

In the traditional finance sector, institutions continue to build internal teams and test blockchain infrastructure while waiting for demand to mature further. According to Moody’s, almost every major bank and large financial intermediary the agency spoke with has already created a digital asset division or innovation team, and has also joined pilot programs related to new financial infrastructure.

Among the companies moving more actively in this direction is Morgan Stanley. Earlier this year, the bank appointed veteran executive Amy Oldenburg to lead its new crypto unit. This came several weeks after the bank disclosed plans to launch three crypto ETFs and a crypto wallet offering.

In addition, macro investor Jordi Visser said on Saturday that the “tokenization reality” could begin to emerge as early as this year, especially as tokenized assets become integrated into agentic AI-based payment systems.

What tokenization is and why banks need it

Tokenization is the conversion of rights to an asset into a digital token that exists on a blockchain or another distributed system. Such an asset can be a bond, fund, deposit, real estate, commodity, or another financial instrument. In essence, the token becomes a digital representation of the asset and can be used to record ownership, transfer rights, and conduct settlements. For banks, this is a way to make asset operations faster, more transparent, and more technologically advanced.

Banks are interested in tokenization primarily because it can potentially reduce costs and speed up settlements. In the traditional financial system, transactions often pass through several intermediaries and can take days, while blockchain infrastructure allows settlements to be conducted almost in real time. Tokenization can also simplify the issuance of financial products, improve the liquidity of some assets, and open access to new client segments. For banks, it is an opportunity not only to modernize infrastructure but also to preserve their role as key intermediaries in the financial system if the market begins shifting toward digital assets.

As a reminder, Moody’s launched a blockchain-based system to provide institutional investors with access to credit ratings.

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