Opinion by: Sebastián Serrano, founder and CEO of Ripio.
For much of the past decade the crypto industry has tried to tokenize niche, illiquid assets to reinvent finance. Creative as that was, it missed a core economic truth: tokenization creates the most value when applied to the center of the economy — highly liquid, widely demanded assets.
The most successful tokenization to date maps directly to the most liquid asset in the world: the US dollar, via USD-backed stablecoins. Companies are now piloting tokenized versions of other liquid instruments — Treasury bills, major currencies and equities — because these assets already have massive demand and standardized legal and financial frameworks. Liquidity is the precondition that lets tokenization move from novelty to infrastructure.
Tokenize what people want
Tokenization should begin with assets that are already essential. Money, sovereign debt and large financial instruments are used daily by governments, corporations and individuals. Tokenizing these assets upgrades the rails on which trillions already move rather than trying to create demand from scratch. Like electricity, which first powered factories rather than art installations, blockchains reach their potential when they support core financial primitives.
Stablecoins succeeded because they directly served an existing, massive use case: moving dollars globally, quickly and cheaply. Tokenized treasuries are gaining traction for the same reason — they represent high-demand assets institutions already hold at scale. Tokenization adds the most value where frictions are large and costly: compressing settlement from days to minutes and allowing assets and cash to move together in real time without intermediaries, changing cost structures and risk profiles.
By contrast, NFTs and bespoke real-world assets are fragmented by design. Each asset is unique, legally ambiguous and difficult to standardize, making them incapable of becoming a shared economic layer. They may have cultural or speculative value, but cannot anchor broad financial network effects.
Market effects of tokenizing liquid assets
Tokenization of illiquid assets can enable fractional ownership or automated workflows, but it does not create continuous trading or deep markets. With liquid assets, tokenization unlocks new behaviors: continuous settlement, streaming payments and automated collateral management. Liquidity determines whether a tokenized asset can be used as collateral — liquid assets have transparent, real-time valuations suitable for automated systems; illiquid assets, with sporadic trades and wide bid-ask spreads, do not.
Capital efficiency rises with liquid tokenized instruments: they can be rehypothecated, fractionally deployed and programmatically allocated in real time, letting capital move faster across the system. Tokenization does not by itself produce continuous markets for inherently illiquid assets.
Reducing risk through clarity
Dollars, government bonds and major corporate debt have established legal status, issuer accountability and regulatory frameworks, so tokenization can fit within existing financial law and ease institutional adoption. NFTs raise thorny questions about ownership, custody and enforceability that can outweigh technical benefits and increase risk.
The future of tokenization will be defined by assets that are economically central. Early NFT experiments were understandable and useful for exploration, but they focused on the wrong type of asset. Stablecoins proved the model by upgrading the most liquid asset; tokenized government bonds and equities are the logical next step. That is how blockchains move from experimental technology to foundational financial infrastructure.
Opinion by: Sebastián Serrano, founder and CEO of Ripio.
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