Wall Street is no Longer Watching Tokenization

For years, tokenization was largely a crypto industry vision. Putting stocks, bonds, funds, and other real-world assets onchain was the main goal. Making them programmable. Making settlement faster. And making markets more accessible.

Traditional finance and institutions watched very closely from the sidelines. Eagerly looking for when to make the shift to onchain, decentralized finance.

This month alone (September, 2026), the London Stock Exchange Group announced plans to explore tokenized UK equities with Kraken's parent company, Payward.

Days later, the Nasdaq announced a $100 million investment in Payward.

And this is happening alongside a much broader shift: asset managers, exchanges, banks, and financial infrastructure providers are increasingly experimenting with tokenized funds, Treasuries, equities, and other real-world assets.

In the article below, we explore how Wall Street is moving onchain, what’s driving this shift, and what it could mean for the future of financial markets.

The first wave of RWA tokenization was largely about proving to traders that traditional assets could exist onchain and enabling anyone to own fractional access to a given asset.

→ Treasuries became tokens.

→ Money market funds became tokens.

Then came tokenized stocks, ETFs, private credit, real estate, and other financial products.

We’re witnessing a growing phase that isn't simply about putting an existing asset onchain. It's about rebuilding parts of the infrastructure around that asset.

That means rethinking:

This is where the recent moves from Nasdaq and LSEG become particularly interesting.

On the 10th of September, 2026, Nasdaq announced that its venture arm would invest $100 million in Payward, the parent company of Kraken.

The investment expands an existing partnership between the two companies focused on developing infrastructure for tokenized equities. Nasdaq is working toward its own tokenized equity offering, with the first products expected in 2027.

This move is significant because Nasdaq isn't simply investing in another crypto company. It's investing in infrastructure that could connect one of the world's largest traditional equity markets with blockchain-based markets.

And Kraken is already operating on the other side of that bridge.

Its xStocks platform provides tokenized exposure to equities and ETFs, giving crypto-native investors access to traditional financial assets.

That also merges into other traditional finance institutions.

Nasdaq isn’t the only one eyeing tokenization.

On the 1st of September, 2026, the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) also announced plans to develop tokenized UK equity structures and partnered with Payward to explore tokenized public equity markets.

LSEG says the initiative is designed to broaden access to capital markets while preserving the shareholder rights, protections and governance standards associated with public markets.

The group is also developing other pieces of digital market infrastructure, including its Digital Securities Depository and Digital Settlement House, alongside its planned LSE 24 venue.

Taken together, these developments point toward something bigger than individual tokenized-stock products. They're part of a broader effort to modernize how securities are issued, traded, settled, and accessed.

As LSEG itself puts it, the goal is to explore how regulated market infrastructure and digital-native distribution can connect with onchain ecosystems while maintaining the obligations and standards of regulated markets.

Tokenized equities may be all over the headlines and in articles, but stocks are only one piece of the RWA market.

Franklin Templeton, for example, has operated a tokenized money market fund since 2021, while BlackRock's BUIDL has become one of the most visible institutional tokenized fund products.

The broader tokenization market now encompasses stocks, bonds, funds, ETFs, commodities, private equity, private credit, and real estate.

Here’s where the lines between traditional finance and decentralized finance start to blur slightly.

For years, the two ecosystems worked and developed separately.

TradFi had:

Stocks → Bonds → Funds → Exchanges → Brokers → Custodians

And DeFi had:

Tokens → Wallets → Blockchains → DEXs → Stablecoins

Tokenization creates a bridge between them. A tokenized treasury can become collateral in a DeFi protocol, a tokenized fund can settle onchain, a tokenized stock can be distributed natively through a DEX, and stablecoins can potentially become the payment rail for financial assets.

We’re not replacing Wall Street, but building alongside it to grow the financial market and to bring more opportunities to traders around the world.

However, there is an interesting contradiction playing out in the United States.

On the 15th of September, 2026, the CLARITY Act failed to advance in the Senate, falling short of the 60 votes needed to move forward. The procedural vote ended 49-50, leaving a major piece of proposed federal crypto market-structure legislation stalled.

This matters for the broader tokenization story because regulatory clarity has long been one of the major questions surrounding blockchain-based financial markets.

Yet while legislation is struggling to move forward, financial infrastructure is already moving.

Graham Ferguson from Securitize noted on X:

Other community members also weighed in, with one noting:

The regulatory framework is still being debated while the financial infrastructure is already being developed. This doesn’t mean regulation is irrelevant. For tokenized securities to scale, questions around ownership rights, investor protections, settlement, and market structure still need clear answers.

The boundaries between traditional finance and crypto are becoming increasingly difficult to separate.

What began as an experiment in bringing real-world assets onto blockchains is evolving into something much bigger: a new layer of financial infrastructure, with more than $38B in distributed RWA value already.

Anchored is part of this growing shift, building at the intersection of RWAs, tokenization, and onchain markets.

By bringing real-world assets into the onchain economy, we're working toward a financial system where these assets can move with speed, accessibility, and programmability.

Wall Street is no longer watching tokenization. They’re building it, alongside the builders shaping what comes next.

. . .

Anchored is the digital operating layer for global capital markets and the infrastructure foundation for Fintech 3.0. Starting with tokenized stocks, Anchored provides the compliant onchain infrastructure for real-world assets, connecting origination, issuance, distribution, settlement, and liquidity across markets and jurisdictions.

Anchored is infrastructure for distribution partners such as exchanges, neobanks, wallets, and DeFi protocols who want to offer tokenized real-world assets to their users.