Traditional asset management is a difficult process. It often requires the involvement of countless intermediaries, including various state organs and supervisors.
Assets such as shares, bonds, property or even land can often be priceless and time -consuming to manage, so that they are put out of the reach of the vast majority of the world’s population.
Moreover, traditional asset management usually includes complex legal similarities and a lot of paperwork, making it all very difficult to follow and transfer ownership. It is a slow and cumbersome system – and one that often lacks sufficient transparency to prevent fraud and other forms of corruption.
Tokenization, although not without his own errors and regulatory obstacles, offers a radical new way of thinking about asset management – a reinvestion of what is possible in the financial and technological world. We explore this new idea below.
What is a sign?
Simply put: “A token is something that represents something else, [and] Can be displayed in any form of form, “according to Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Blockchain Venture Studio Consensys.” It can be a piece of paper. It can be an idea. It is a symbol that represents something, “he said.” For example, your driver’s license is a sign that is indexed in a ledger that maintains the state who is legal to drive. “
You can consider a blockchain-based token as a type of digital reception for a slice of an active. But unlike the well -to -do, these tokens are invariably registered on an auditable blockchain.
Did you know that?
Blockchain technology and tokens have their origins in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
In 2009, Bitcoin Introduced a peer-to-peer system for transferring value on the internet. The Bitcoin blockchain makes it possible for transactions to be done in a decentralizedTrustless and unchanging way-alles while the so-called double-hone problem is avoided, so that transactions are not copied fraudulently and are copied and duplicated digitally.
The innovation led entrepreneurs to propose new use cases for Bitcoin’s underlying technology. In 2015, Ethereum introduced the fintech world in one programmable Blockchain – made a breakthrough possible by Ethereum’s Smart contract technology.
Ethereum took the same technology on which Bitcoin was built and made it over more Then only cryptocurrency and stores of value.
It was not long before thousands of tokens were developed on the Ethereum network, each with its own different attributes and benefits. Unlike cryptocurrencies, tokens have different potential use cases – everything from the management of real estate, shares and contracts to food decentralized Applications and games.
Token use cases
In general there are two types of tokens: Utility tokens and security sticks.
Utility -Tokens are digital assets that give their owners access to products or services produced by a company. As the label indicates, these tokens are intended used For something, instead of held or traded. A utility token can, for example, offer access to a future service, such as renting computing power, placing a bet in a sports game or throwing a legally binding mood.
Good software, the makers of the privacy-oriented Brave Web browser, created the basic attention, or BAT-A utility -token designed for the advertisement -industry that earns money from web users’ attention.
Security Stokens, on the other hand, are digital assets that represent a kind of investment, such as a share in a company, a voting right in how the company works, a value unit or a combination of the three. These tokens can also represent parts of real-world assets, such as gold, classic cars or royalties from your favorite pop song.
As such, Safety Stoken must meet the existing regulatory frameworks that regulate traditional effects, such as shares. As a result, an entire industry has developed to help tokenization entrepreneurs to comply with the applicable regulations.
Securitize, a crypto startup supported by leading the American cryptocurrency -exchange coinbase, is such a company that specializes in the issuance and management of digital effects, with the explicit goal of helping told token publishers in accordance with.
Apart from utility and security stands, there are also special non-fungal tokens, known as NFTs. These tokens represent unique digital items, ranging from profile photo collections such as cryptopunks and bored monkey hunting club, to individual artworks that have sold tens of millions of dollars.
Tokenize or not to tokenize …
The promise of tokenization rests in its potential to democratize access to digital assets, as well as the ability to offer responsibility, safety and origin for these assets.
“Creating tokens that represent real assets that can be traded and offering responsibility is extremely useful,” said Paul Snow, founder and CEO of Factom, said Decrypt.
People believe they have the stock, but they really don’t do that; They have a receipt for a share and it is a kind of ‘trust -our’ process.
A blockchain -based system eliminates the need to trust an intermediary. But it also offers a better level of accounting, explained with snow, which can be particularly favorable for companies that relate to fraud prevention.
That is at least in an ideal world.
At the end of June 2025, the popular Trade App Robobhood revealed that more than 200 shares tokenized and were tradable on the Ethereum Layer-2 Network Arbitrum for EU customers. Two of these shares include OpenAi and SpaceX, private companies that said Robinhood, gave “indirect exposure to private markets”. OpenAi did not agree and issued a public statement stating that they rejected the offer.
Despite the return, Vladimir Teev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, said in an interview with July 2025 with Bloomberg That the offers of the private company would not stop there.
“We would like to have thousands of private companies on the platform, accessible to the retail trade,” Teev told Bloomberg. “And actually, since our announcement, I have had a flood of questions [from] Private companies that actually want to have access to the retail trade, to make their shares tokenized, to be part of this revolution. “
Kurt Watkins, founder of the US -based company Watkins Legal, said Decrypt That the offer was probably “commercially not viable” in the US due to the lack of transparency and legal ambiguity.
Regulators around the world, and in particular in the United States, are now paying very good attention to the Cryptocurrency The industry, with so far an eye on the way tokens were purchased, sold and distributed.
And the rules on the sale, distribution and management of Tokenized assets will vary from country to country, crypto startups that are aimed at building worldwide, boundless systems must now compete with regulatory and compliance measures in each of the law areas they expect to do business.
This, too, has now become a difficult and expensive process, especially in the United States, where many token-based companies choose to bring their companies abroad where the rules are less strict instead.
Nevertheless, American supervisors have shown recent signs of warming up to Tokenized assets and blockchain entrepreneurs continue to develop innovative use for tokenization, as well as solutions to improve the scalability of their respective networks.
The future
Tokenization promises a world where almost every active or service can be represented and stored on a blockchain. The possibilities are theoretically endless. But just like the early days of the internet, we are just starting to understand which ideas are most suitable for this technology.
They are still early days, but the transition to a tokenized world can change the way we think about everything that really has value.
This article was published in July 2023 and updated in July 2025.