Broadridge moves roughly $370 billion in tokenized repo every single day on the Canton network. That number landed at TokenizeThis 2026 like a quiet punchline, because for years the tokenization conversation was almost entirely theoretical. Not anymore.
Bitcoin was hovering around $60,000 for most of the conference, and speakers barely mentioned it. The two narratives have split. Tokenized real-world assets have crossed $30 billion in total value, about six times where they were at the start of 2025, and the crowd at TokenizeThis wasn't debating whether the idea has merit. They were arguing about plumbing.
Demand is no longer the question
RedStone's founders opened their keynote with a survey from EY and Coinbase Institutional: 64% of asset managers now want to tokenize their products, up from 40% a year ago. The founders' read was blunt. The demand argument is settled. What changed the mood most, though, was regulation. The GENIUS Act gave stablecoins a legal home. The CLARITY Act, still working through the Senate, is the one that could open the full range of asset classes to tokenization. RedStone co-founder Marcin Kazmierczak put a number on it: CLARITY could be a 10x or even 100x moment relative to GENIUS. That's a wide range, but the direction is clear.
Cash and collateral go first, everything else follows
Repo is the early proving ground for a simple reason. Ami Ben-David, CEO at Ownera, said it plainly at the repo panel: if you want to borrow for five minutes, you pay for five minutes instead of a full day. No legacy system does that. Broadridge's $370 billion daily figure is still a sliver of the $12 trillion US repo market, but it's real volume on a real network, not a pilot press release.
Apollo's Christine Moy added another concrete data point from her firm's tokenized private credit fund. She calls the benefits "superpowers": secondary liquidity for assets that normally have none, and the ability to post private credit as collateral. Those aren't hypothetical gains. Illiquid private credit becoming usable as collateral mid-day is a structural shift in how institutional portfolios can operate. The recurring principle across panels was that a tokenized product has to be a net better product than whatever it replaces. If it isn't, nobody will use it.
The infrastructure gaps are still real. Interoperability between networks, legal clarity on asset ownership on-chain, and custodial frameworks for institutions are all unresolved. The conference's tone wasn't triumphant so much as operational: the phase of convincing people tokenization could work is over, and the phase of making it work without friction has barely started. Institutional appetite for digital assets is clearly there, which only raises the pressure on the infrastructure side to catch up.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or an investment recommendation.
