Aleks Larsen, a partner at Blockchain Capital, says tokenization is reshaping the basic way capital markets record, transfer, and use assets rather than simply moving existing instruments onto blockchains.
In the article, published by MarsBit and translated by ChainCatcher, Larsen frames the central problem in finance as an expensive issue of “packaging.” Different assets are recorded and managed in different ways across disconnected systems. A mortgage may be represented through contracts, PDF files, databases, and servicing relationships. A private fund interest may exist as a subscription agreement and a line item in transfer-agent records. Equity ownership may be spread across brokers, custodians, and securities depositories.
When an asset moves from one institution to another, the original records often need to be broken apart, verified, reconciled, and rebuilt under the recipient’s rules. Larsen says many workflows exist for no reason other than the fact that different institutions record the same underlying asset or right in different formats.
He writes that balance sheets around the world contain nearly $1,800 trillion in assets, and a large share of them still cannot move freely between institutions unless dedicated operational processes are built for them. Those frictions slow the redeployment of capital into new businesses, infrastructure, housing, and other productive uses.
Tokenization as a fix for fragmented financial packaging
Larsen argues that tokenization addresses that problem at the root. A token gives an asset or financial right a standardized, machine-readable interface. Once an asset can be identified and used on a shared network, trading venues, lenders, custodians, asset servicers, and software applications can interact with it directly instead of rebuilding financial plumbing each time.
That opens the door to capital markets running on a common, programmable base network where assets can move, settle, and be used with less friction.
To explain the scale of the shift, Larsen turns to containerization. In his view, it is the best analogy for understanding what tokenization can do.
Why Larsen compares tokens to shipping containers
Before the 1960s, cargo moved in many different forms. Coffee was shipped in sacks, machinery in wooden crates, cotton in bales, and oil in barrels. Each commodity had its own loading requirements, so ships depended heavily on manual labor.
Experienced dockworkers developed specialized skills to pack cargo tightly, balance weight, and secure goods so they would not shift or break at sea. Larsen says that craft was indispensable because there was no unified packaging standard for freight.
The result was inefficiency. Ships often spent more time in port than at sea. Break-bulk cargo had to be loaded, unloaded, and counted repeatedly as it moved between ships, trains, trucks, and warehouses, while damage, loss, and theft remained common.
In 1956, North Carolina freight entrepreneur Malcolm McLean converted an oil tanker into the Ideal-X, loaded it with 58 detachable truck trailers, and sailed from Newark to Houston.
When the ship arrived, trucks could haul the containers away without opening them. Loading costs on the Ideal-X came to just $0.16 per ton, about 36 times cheaper than traditional break-bulk shipping. Larsen presents that moment as the birth of the modern shipping container.
Over the next 20 years, standards formed around container sizes, connectors, and load requirements. The entire supply chain reorganized around that standardized box, and each part of the system became more specialized.
Ships adopted vertical cells so containers could be stacked safely. Cranes were redesigned for fast, standardized lifts. Truck chassis and railcars converged around common dimensions and locking points. Ports turned into large transfer hubs built to move containers efficiently across modes of transport.
The most immediate effect was a sharp drop in time and capital costs. Larsen writes that shipping time from Australia to Europe fell from 70 days to 34 days, while vessel capacity rose fourfold.
Trade patterns changed as well. International commerce shifted more toward manufactured and intermediate goods. Companies began splitting production across countries, and new logistics firms emerged to coordinate increasingly complex global networks.
The larger economic effect was even more dramatic. Citing the World Bank, Larsen says bilateral trade between developed countries rose 1,240% in the 15 years after both sides adopted container shipping. In his telling, containerization and the infrastructure built around it allowed global supply chains to scale and accelerated world economic growth.
Tokens as standardized containers for financial rights
Larsen describes a token as a standardized container for financial rights. It does not carry goods; it carries ownership, transfer rules, cash flows, permission requirements, and other state information tied to an asset. In practical terms, the token records who owns an asset, how it can move, what cash flows it produces, and what software is allowed to do with it.
Once an asset has a machine-readable interface, trading venues can list it, lending markets can accept it as collateral, custodians can hold it, and wallets can receive and route the cash flows it generates. Software can recognize the asset directly and execute its rules without negotiating bespoke integrations with every institution involved.
That, Larsen says, is the key difference between tokenization and simply digitizing documents or adding another database. All participants can identify and use the asset through the same standard. Once that standard is adopted across an ecosystem, network effects start to compound.
Stablecoins as the clearest proof of concept
For Larsen, stablecoins show that dynamic most clearly. A traditional international wire transfer usually moves through correspondent banking networks and can take days to complete a dollar transfer. A stablecoin can reach anywhere in the world in seconds, with near-zero cost for a purely on-chain transfer.
He attributes that to a network that already exists: exchanges, custodians, fiat-to-stablecoin conversion providers, payment processors, and wallets all recognize the stablecoin token interface. He compares them to the ports, cranes, trucks, trains, and cargo ships of the financial world, moving value in tokenized form.
Much of that infrastructure, he notes, was first built for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Once it existed, stablecoins and other tokens could move across the same rails. Stablecoin activity then drew in more users, liquidity, applications, and infrastructure, making it easier for later tokenized assets to use the same network.
Larsen says the results are already visible. Roughly $300 billion in stablecoins are circulating today. Their transaction volume is approaching Visa’s scale, and their turnover is around 10 times that of traditional M1/M2 money.
He adds that cross-border payment costs have fallen by an order of magnitude, while hundreds of millions of people globally have gained more reliable access to dollars and payment channels. At least in the dollar context, he says, this network has already proved superior to the traditional system on cost, speed, and reach. The same dollar can circulate through the network more often, which raises capital efficiency.
That active dollar pool is now pulling other assets on-chain to absorb stablecoin liquidity. Larsen says on-chain tokenized assets outside stablecoins are now nearing $40 billion, about 10 times the level seen two years ago, with growth still accelerating.
Those assets include U.S. Treasuries, money market funds, commodities, private credit, equities, and fund interests, with hundreds of issuers already involved.
The article’s chart cites RWA.xyz for total on-chain RWA size.
Tare and Aave as examples of on-chain workflows and asset-based access
Larsen says the natural next step is to move the business processes behind financial assets on-chain as well.
He points to Tare, a Blockchain Capital portfolio company, as an example. According to the article, Tare is bringing loan origination, lifecycle management, and securitization on-chain while using tokens to record the full lifecycle information of each underlying loan.
With lightweight software and transparent markets, Tare aims to replace a traditional lending chain that Larsen describes as costly and full of intermediaries. In that market, lenders and borrowers can record and verify tokenized loans on the same ledger.
He argues that this model can lower borrowing costs and make loans easier to use as collateral across different on-chain applications, drawing in more assets and capital. Larsen adds that similar opportunities exist across asset classes. As infrastructure improves, network effects should continue attracting liquidity, users, and applications, which in turn would speed up the growth of tokenized assets.
He then shifts to the structure of capital markets themselves. Just as global supply chains reorganized around containers, he says global capital markets will reorganize around tokens.
In Larsen’s view, that structure is already visible in decentralized finance. He cites Aave, another Blockchain Capital portfolio company, which lets users post eligible tokens as collateral and borrow from lending markets at floating rates. The relevant rules are embedded in the protocol, while the question of whether an asset qualifies as collateral is determined by asset-level standards.
That differs sharply from traditional lending markets. In today’s financial system, an individual or business looking to borrow against an asset usually has to find an institution first. The institution controls market access, evaluates the borrower through its own process, and delivers products through its own network. What services a customer can get depends largely on the relationship with that financial institution.
On Aave, Larsen says, the real access condition is the asset itself. Smart contracts recognize the token, execute transparent rules, and connect it to capital markets.
That changes the logic of financial access: services begin to organize around the asset, not mainly around which institution the asset holder knows or can reach.
How tokenization could unbundle financial institutions
Larsen summarizes the shift by saying tokens make assets executable in the way software is executable. When an asset exists in a form that public networks can recognize, different applications can build trading, financing, payments, and treasury services around the same asset. Exchanges can bring it to market, lending protocols can accept it as collateral, and wallets can receive and route the cash flows it generates.
For issuers, the asset only needs to come on-chain once to connect with multiple applications. They do not need to build a separate system for each use case.
He says that would also change how financial institutions are organized. Banks, brokerages, and asset managers currently tend to bundle custody, underwriting, liquidity, asset management, compliance, and distribution inside closed product stacks.
Crypto networks allow those functions to be separated and specialized. One institution might originate and manage loans, while others provide capital, assess risk, execute trades, offer insurance, or build applications that use the asset.
Assets can move through those specialized services via a unified interface without being re-registered and re-integrated every time they enter a new provider’s system. In Larsen’s framing, scale advantages therefore move away from a single institution and toward the network as a whole.
He writes that large institutions in traditional finance can support more products because they can absorb the fixed cost of building infrastructure for many assets and client types. On public crypto networks, much of that infrastructure is shared by all participants.
New service providers can plug into existing assets, capital, and user networks without rebuilding ledgers, trading systems, custody rails, or settlement systems. That reduces both system-building costs and barriers to market entry.
Larsen argues that stablecoin network effects have already crossed the threshold into self-reinforcement. Capital markets, he says, will increasingly reorganize as open service networks built around tokenized assets. In that setup, institutions compete on who can provide better capital, underwriting, risk management, asset servicing, and distribution rather than on who owns the database or controls the only gateway to the market.
A global balance sheet moving on-chain
Larsen says the most important consequence of this transition would be the creation of a global capital market.
Today’s capital markets are still constrained by financial institutions. Most individuals and businesses cannot access capital markets directly. They choose from a limited set of products offered by institutions that are willing and able to serve them. Which clients get served, which geographies are covered, which asset classes are supported, and what trade sizes are accepted are all determined by institutions.
Investors face the same limits from the other direction. They cannot access the full universe of global assets. They can invest only in assets that institutions have already underwritten, packaged, integrated, and distributed. As a result, Larsen says, a large amount of economic value remains outside the reach of current capital markets.
He lists small receivables, local infrastructure, private businesses, emerging-market credit, and nontraditional cash flows as examples. These assets may have real economic value, but they can be too small, too fragmented, not well known enough, or too far from major capital centers to justify the cost of financing them through traditional financial systems.
In his formulation, the investment opportunity may exist, and capital may exist, but the network connecting the two does not.
Tokenization provides a standard interface that allows assets to be discovered and used on a global financial network. As finance reorganizes around that interface, Larsen says the cost of market access for all participants should fall materially.
Financial functions would then be embedded directly into software in the same way payment and data interfaces are embedded today. Developers could build specialized services for narrow asset categories and specific regions, extending capital markets into areas that have been hard to reach. Commercial software that historically lacked access to advanced financial services could integrate payments, working-capital finance, collateral management, and treasury functions directly into its own systems, bringing idle or underserved assets into on-chain capital markets.
Larsen is explicit that tokenization will not magically make unfinanceable assets financeable. Over the long run, though, he says it can bring many good-quality assets into capital markets that are currently excluded for structural reasons.
Why he sees AI as an amplifier
The article closes by arguing that AI could magnify these changes by helping handle the complex parts of asset evaluation and operations.
Larsen writes that AI agents could operate in a global, efficient, machine-readable market to assess assets, price risk, allocate capital, manage collateral, and complete settlement. That would push down the cost of providing financial services even more.
With AI and crypto infrastructure working together, he says markets that are now highly customized and do not trade continuously could become always-on, global, and increasingly automated. That would create more opportunities across regions and weaken the grip of institutional barriers on capital flows.
He describes capital allocation as one of the core mechanisms that shape how society’s resources are deployed. It influences which companies scale, which technologies are commercialized, which homes and factories get built, and which regions develop.
Under today’s financial system, some assets are simply not worth evaluating and financing because they are too small, too local, too unusual in structure, or too costly to manage. If the cost of finding, financing, and managing those assets falls sharply, they may re-enter capital markets.
Larsen returns to containerization for his final comparison. Containers did not just lower transport costs. They made new trade and production models economically viable. Goods could be produced where costs were lowest, assembled elsewhere, and sold globally because the cost of coordinating the network had fallen dramatically.
He argues tokens can do the same for capital. Over the coming decades, global balance sheets could evolve from isolated records into a market that software can identify and access directly. Capital would then flow more on asset quality and return potential, and less on whether an institution controls the distribution channel.
If stablecoin development is any guide, Larsen concludes, that shift could materially expand global capital markets and extend them into regions they have never truly covered before.