Fidelity International’s Giselle Lai said at the WebX conference in Tokyo that the long-term appeal of tokenized funds is not the trading pitch around 24/7 access. It is balance sheet management.
Lai, a director and digital assets strategist for APAC at Fidelity International, argued that large institutions care less about whether an instrument is tokenized than about what it can do. They need cash parked in multiple bank accounts around the world to meet regulatory rules, manage currency exposure and have liquidity ready when it is needed, and those deposits often earn nothing. Tokenized instruments, she said, can move more efficiently, generate yield around the clock and fit into broader liquidity needs in a way conventional wrappers do not.
That argument lands in a market that is already large and growing. Tokenized money market funds are the most popular category of tokenized products, with more than $15 billion in assets under management. The largest of them is BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, which debuted in March 2024. More broadly, the onchain real-world asset market excluding stablecoins has surpassed $31 billion, while the global asset tokenization market is valued at roughly $2.1 trillion and is forecast by Grand View Research to reach $24.5 trillion by 2033, with some industry estimates putting it as high as $88 trillion by 2035.
The friction is that tokenized funds are still being sold to many buyers as a better way to trade, while Lai’s point was about treasury plumbing. She said institutions are not asking for tokens themselves. They are asking what tokenized products can do beyond the wrappers they already use. That leaves a large gap between a fund that can be moved in a digital form and a full balance-sheet tool that can actually replace the patchwork of cash accounts institutions rely on today.
Lai said the ecosystem needed to make that shift could take almost 20 years to build, echoing the long development of the ETF industry. The near-term story is simpler: tokenized money market funds are already here, and the next test is whether large institutions treat them as a convenience for trading or as infrastructure for managing cash across borders. If Lai is right, the real market for tokenization will not be the click; it will be the cash room.
