The line between traditional finance (TradFi) and crypto is disappearing, with tokenization consistently being a dominant narrative in the digital asset industry for a number of years.
Edwin Mata, CEO and founder of tokenization platform Brickken, predicts that Wall Street will run entirely on blockchain technology by 2030. Mata told CoinDesk that tech industry buzzwords like “Web3” are fading as major banks adopt the technology for basic financial plumbing such as settlements and payments.
“The merger between Wall Street and technology will disappear,” Mata said in an interview. “We’re not going to talk about blockchain anymore. It’s going to be about fintech.”
As institutional interest in tokenizing real-world assets grows, driven by big moves like BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, Mata warned that Europe is overregulating itself out of the race.
This push for blockchain-native infrastructure was highlighted by Bullish’s (BLSH) $4.2 billion acquisition of transfer agent Equiniti. The deal focuses on corporate shareholder tracking to ensure shares are issued and registered directly on-chain from the outset, rather than using synthetic digital ‘wrappers’. Bullish is also the parent company of CoinDesk.
The next shift to tokenization will not be driven by humans, but by software, Mata said. Brickken, a Barcelona, Spain-based tokenization platform that has served as a path to on-chain $500 million in real-world assets, is currently integrating AI agents to automate asset onboarding and liquidity purchasing for its 200 customers. .
Mata predicts that traditional software dashboards will soon be replaced by simple chat prompts, with AI agents doing the backend work to find the best financial returns.
“The decision maker won’t be us anymore. It will be AI,” Mata said.
Mata also criticized the European Union’s MiCA regulatory framework, which he said protects legacy banks by imposing expensive, slow-moving compliance rules on small startups.
“Smaller players do not have access to the market, creating a moat for the bigger players,” Mata said. ‘It could take nine months [to get a license]and if you’re a startup, nine months without generating revenue, you’re dead.”
Startups may choose to move to the UAE and Southeast Asia rather than face these steep barriers. Mata believes the US will remain the main powerhouse for crypto innovation simply because the country controls the world’s largest capital market, causing the current regulatory disputes in Washington to temporarily stir up controversy.
France-based Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet shared Mata’s criticism. He told CoinDesk that the EU’s regulatory framework has transformed Web3’s competitive landscape, unintendedly impacting crypto startups and instead vastly benefiting existing financial institutions.
Read more: Abra’s Bill Barhydt Says Wall Street’s Next Crypto Bet Is Tokenization