Day two at TOKEN2049 turned to one of the bigger questions in crypto right now: how tokenized assets are pushing into institutional finance. Michael Ippolito, the Blockworks co-founder, moderated the panel. Onstage with him were Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson, Binance co-CEO Richard Teng, and Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz, whose company builds Canton Network.
Institutions want clear rules before they scale
The discussion started with regulation. Johnson said the GENIUS Act passing in the U.S. last year gave the market a clear signal that crypto is entering the mainstream, even though the Clarity Act, which would have laid out rules for the wider crypto market, failed to pass. Her take was blunt: institutions want regulatory clarity first. And she said both the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are already working to spell out those rules more plainly.
Teng said blockchain adoption before that legislation was mostly pushed by retail users. They saw the value of moving money anytime, long before banks caught on. Traditional bank transfers, he said, still take 2 to 3 days. Then the law passed, and financial institutions and payment firms started coming in. Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea also made changes, he said, reacting to competitive pressure from the U.S.
Rooz said institutions mostly worry about regulators arriving after everything is already done. His argument: the industry needs to make the tech so widely used that not even the result of the 2028 U.S. election can unwind it.
Franklin Templeton points to lower on-chain operating costs
Johnson pointed to Benji, Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund, as a real-world example. She said that when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved the product, Franklin Templeton had to keep shareholder records on both the blockchain and its old system for 8 months. The old setup cost $75,000. Putting the same records on Stellar cost $167.
She also said putting financial infrastructure on-chain cuts the minimum needed to open an account. Franklin Templeton’s traditional money market fund requires $500 to open one, because tiny balances would otherwise shift transaction costs onto other shareholders. Benji requires $20. And she said that floor could drop to $5 later on.
Rooz added another set of numbers. Reconciliation between institutions alone is estimated to cost $130 billion a year, he said. At the same time, about $40 trillion in assets worldwide sits idle because settlement gets stuck. He said a case study is coming soon involving a Fortune 100 company with $10 billion in cash. Move that cash in real time into a digital money market fund, he said, and the company could produce more than $300 million in extra annual income.
Binance says tokenized U.S. stocks are trading heavily outside U.S. hours
Teng said access to U.S. equities has long been shaped by where an investor happens to live, adding that people around the world are limited by where they were born. He said Binance now offers about 7,000 U.S. stocks, and roughly 1,000 of those are already tokenized.
He said more than 40% of trading in tokenized stocks now takes place when U.S. equity markets are closed. In practice, that means Asia daytime hours. News hits whenever it hits. Investors want to trade and hedge 24 hours a day, not sit around waiting for the opening bell.
Rooz made much the same argument, pointing to geopolitical events like conflict in the Middle East. When those things happen outside normal market hours, he said, liquidity shows up on-chain right away. In his view, that is changing the way global markets work.
Pre-IPO trading still runs into liquidity and information gaps
Ippolito then turned to private companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Johnson said the stretch from founding to listing has expanded from 3 to 4 years in 2000 to 10 to 11 years now. That leaves ordinary investors locked out of much of the early growth. Tokenization can help, she said. But private assets are just harder to trade. Simple as that. They still need market makers to supply liquidity.
Teng said employees holding stock options and early investors both need a path to exit, and they need transparent pricing too. He said Binance’s pre-listing trading product is designed to meet that demand. Rooz said the biggest problem is still information asymmetry, though perpetual contracts tied to private stock prices have already started to appear.
Stablecoins may pull deposits from banks
Asked where stablecoins could be two years from now, Rooz said it comes down to trust and distribution. USDT and USDC are still used mostly for crypto trading. But if companies with massive user bases like Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe move in, he said, stablecoins will spread into uses beyond trading.
Teng said regulators across several jurisdictions are now stepping in, and that compliance and transparency will remake the market. Tokenized bank deposits, he added, will be in that fight too.
Johnson looked at it from the banking side. Stablecoins could pull money away from bank deposits, she said, and deposits are what banks use to fund lending. So banks are beginning to issue tokenized deposits and link traditional accounts to blockchain rails.