Larry Fink and How Tokenisation Could Transform Finance

Tokenisation is not a crypto experiment.

Markets still run on slow, inconsistent plumbing, where ownership, settlement, and reconciliation sit on pre-internet rails. Programmable ledgers collapse settlement time, reduce counterparty exposure, and standardise custody and identity across asset classes. They also rewire private markets by enabling fractionalisation, secondary liquidity, and auditability without bespoke fund structures or manual legal workflows.

The strategic split is now geographic. Most tokenised-asset users live outside Western markets, where weak banking access and high cross-border frictions make new rails immediately useful. Meanwhile, Western regulation still treats digital wrappers as exotic, repeating the early ETF cycle where the wrapper changed but the underlying risk did not.

Jurisdictions that regulate the activity rather than the technology will capture liquidity migration. Fink’s point is blunt: the next asset-management frontier is a convergence between institutional allocators and digital-asset infrastructure. Whoever builds the connective layer defines the new distribution standard.

This is where our portfolio company Particula fits. Tokenised assets cannot scale without trustworthy risk information. As settlement moves on-chain, risk moves with it. Issuers and allocators need independent visibility into counterparties, issuance structures, collateral, reserves, and operational behaviour across thousands of tokens and 24/7 markets.

Particula’s rating engine, real-time monitoring, and methodology bridge that gap. It reduces information asymmetry, turns fragmented on- and off-chain data into decision-grade signals, and introduces the risk-assessment infrastructure that traditional finance relies on.

The rails can change only when trust scales with them. Tokenisation solves distribution. Particula solves confidence in the assets moving across those rails.

More here: Larry Fink & Rob Goldstein in The Economist