From JPMorgan to Goldman Sachs: How Wall Street's Tokenization Buildout Will Capture $16 Trillion

The question for Wall Street’s largest institutions has not been whether to tokenize financial assets — it has been which infrastructure to own and how quickly to build it. BCG’s estimate of $16 trillion in tokenized assets by 2030 implies not just a technology transition but a fundamental restructuring of financial market plumbing: the settlement systems, custody arrangements, collateral frameworks, and payment rails that have underpinned institutional finance for decades. The banks, custodians, and market infrastructure firms that build the dominant tokenization platforms will capture infrastructure rent — fees, custody revenues, trading spreads — from every transaction that flows through that infrastructure.

JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, BNY Mellon, State Street, and Broadridge have all made production-grade commitments to tokenization infrastructure. This is not a matter of press release strategy; these are capital-intensive technology buildouts with dedicated engineering teams, regulatory approvals, and live client volume. The competition for tokenization infrastructure dominance is underway, and the early volume metrics suggest JPMorgan and Broadridge are holding commanding early leads.

JPMorgan Kinexys: The Volume Leader

JPMorgan was the first major Wall Street bank to publicly commit to blockchain-based financial infrastructure, launching the Quorum consortium blockchain in 2016 and creating its in-house digital assets division, Onyx by J.P. Morgan, in 2020. In late 2024, JPMorgan rebranded the entire division as Kinexys — a signal that the platform had graduated from internal experiment to named product franchise.

Kinexys operates three distinct product lines that together address the most critical institutional finance use cases: intraday liquidity, corporate treasury operations, and collateral mobility.

Kinexys Digital Payments enables institutional clients to settle US dollar and euro-denominated payments in minutes via a tokenized deposit network, rather than waiting for the end-of-day settlement that characterizes most interbank transfers. For corporate treasury operations — where the timing difference between paying $500 million out of one account and receiving it in another can cost millions in overnight funding — the ability to settle intraday, 24 hours a day, is genuinely transformative. JPMorgan’s own treasury operation uses Kinexys Digital Payments internally; external clients include Goldman Sachs and BlackRock for specific liquidity management functions.

Kinexys Coin Systems extends this functionality into programmable USD and EUR stablecoins for corporate treasury. Unlike public stablecoins such as USDC, Kinexys coins are liabilities of JPMorgan — tokenized bank deposits rather than independently issued stablecoins. This distinction is legally and practically significant: Kinexys coin holders have a direct claim on JPMorgan, the same as a bank deposit, rather than a claim on a reserve pool managed by a non-bank. For large corporate treasuries — with single counterparty exposure concerns that make non-bank stablecoins unattractive — the JPMorgan liability structure is essential. More than 200 corporations use JPM Coin for treasury operations as of early 2026.

Kinexys Digital Assets handles the collateral mobility use case: the ability to move tokenized securities across custodians and counterparties in real time, enabling intraday collateral optimization at a scale and speed that traditional settlement infrastructure cannot match. In a traditional repo transaction, collateral must be delivered through DTCC’s DTC settlement system — a process that takes hours and requires the counterparty to be operationally available. Kinexys enables collateral to move in minutes, on-demand, through the private Kinexys blockchain network. Goldman Sachs has been a prominent user of this functionality for intraday liquidity management.

The $1 trillion in cumulative Kinexys transaction volume reached by the end of 2024 is the single most important data point in institutional tokenization. It demonstrates that the technology can handle institutional-scale volume, that clients trust the platform with real capital in real situations, and that the incremental value proposition — faster, cheaper, more flexible settlement — is sufficient to justify operational migration from legacy systems.

JPMorgan’s competitive advantage in tokenization infrastructure derives from the same source as its competitive advantage in traditional banking: the combination of a massive balance sheet, a trusted counterparty status with every major financial institution, and the network effect of having other large institutions already on the platform. A repo counterparty that wants to use Kinexys for intraday collateral mobility must first onboard to Kinexys — and as more counterparties join, the network becomes more valuable to every existing participant. JPMorgan is building a tokenization network effect, and it has a substantial head start.

Goldman Sachs GS DAP: Bond Issuance on the Blockchain

Goldman Sachs approached institutional tokenization differently from JPMorgan. Rather than building payment infrastructure, Goldman focused on the capital markets use case: tokenized bond issuance. GS DAP — the Goldman Sachs Digital Asset Platform — is a private, permissioned blockchain built on Ethereum technology that enables bond issuers to issue, price, and settle digital bonds in hours rather than the weeks required for traditional bond underwriting.

Goldman’s first major tokenized bond transaction came in April 2021: a €100 million digital bond for the European Investment Bank, co-managed with Banco Santander and Société Générale. The bond was issued, traded, and settled on GS DAP within a single business day — demonstrating end-to-end functionality for a live institutional transaction. The EIB has since returned to GS DAP for additional digital bond issuances, suggesting the experience met the institutional standard required for repeat business.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority tokenized green bond issuance in 2023 represented Goldman’s expansion into sovereign digital debt markets. The $100 million bond — part of Hong Kong’s HK$800 million tokenized green bond program — settled on GS DAP and was distributed to institutional investors across Asia. The transaction demonstrated that GS DAP could handle multi-jurisdictional digital bond issuance, clearing a key concern about the platform’s utility for internationally distributed sovereign debt.

Goldman’s World Bank digital bond program added a multilateral development bank to the GS DAP issuer roster. For Goldman’s institutional investor clients — pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies that are major World Bank bond buyers — the ability to hold tokenized World Bank bonds in digital custody rather than physical form reduced custody costs and enabled more efficient collateral management.

GS DAP’s technical architecture is worth understanding for institutional investors evaluating the platform’s longevity. The platform runs on a private, permissioned instance of Ethereum — sharing the security and developer tooling of the public Ethereum network but restricting participation to permissioned parties. This design choice prioritizes regulatory compliance and privacy (transaction details are not visible on the public blockchain) while retaining the smart contract functionality that enables automated coupon payments and programmable bond structures.

Goldman’s Bloomberg integration is commercially significant: GS DAP bonds appear in Bloomberg Terminal with real-time pricing data, enabling portfolio managers to value their tokenized bond holdings through the same systems they use for traditional fixed income. The absence of Bloomberg integration had been a barrier to institutional adoption of tokenized bonds — investment committees reasonably required that new instruments be valued using established, auditable price sources. GS DAP’s Bloomberg integration removed that barrier.

Broadridge DLR: The Repo Market’s Digital Nervous System

If JPMorgan’s Kinexys is the most versatile institutional tokenization platform, Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo is the most impactful by settled volume. DLR focuses exclusively on the repo market — the $10 trillion daily overnight lending market that serves as the financial system’s primary short-term liquidity mechanism — and has achieved a level of institutional penetration that makes it the closest thing to a critical infrastructure component in the tokenization landscape.

DLR enables broker-dealers to execute repo transactions — where one party sells securities and simultaneously agrees to repurchase them — on a distributed ledger, settling in minutes rather than hours and enabling real-time visibility into collateral positions. The efficiency gains are significant: traditional repo settlement through DTCC involves multiple system handoffs, each adding time and operational risk. DLR collapses the settlement timeline and creates a shared, real-time view of collateral that all counterparties can access simultaneously.

The December 2024 record of $384 billion settled in a single day is the number that stops financial industry conversations short. $384 billion is more than the entire market capitalization of the largest bank in America on a bad day. It is a volume that rivals the entire daily settlement of the US equity market. Achieving this on a distributed ledger — not a traditional settlement system — means that institutional tokenization has crossed the threshold into the financial system’s critical infrastructure tier.

DLR’s client base includes essentially every major broker-dealer in the US and European markets. The network effect in repo is stronger than in almost any other financial instrument: repo transactions require matched buyers and sellers, and being on DLR means being able to transact with all other DLR participants. As more broker-dealers join, the liquidity benefit for each participant increases. Broadridge has built a repo liquidity network on distributed ledger technology — a combination that creates substantial competitive moat.

The cost savings from DLR adoption are estimated at over $1 million per day across the system — derived from reduced fails, lower financing costs from intraday collateral visibility, and reduced operational staffing for reconciliation. For individual broker-dealers, the ROI calculation on DLR integration is straightforwardly positive, which explains the rapid adoption rate.

Citi Token Services: Eliminating the Correspondent Bank

Citigroup’s tokenization initiative is more narrowly scoped than JPMorgan’s or Goldman’s — but it addresses one of the most costly and archaic inefficiencies in global finance: cross-border wholesale payment settlement via correspondent banking networks.

A standard international payment between two corporations today travels through a chain of correspondent banks — typically 3-5 intermediaries across different jurisdictions — each charging fees and introducing settlement delays. A payment from a US corporate to a European supplier might take 2-5 business days and cost 0.3-0.7% of the transaction value in bank fees alone. For a global corporation moving hundreds of millions of dollars weekly in international payments, these costs are material.

Citi Token Services, launched in 2023, removes correspondent banks from the equation for qualifying clients by using tokenized bank deposits on a private blockchain. When Citi’s client in New York needs to pay Citi’s client in Singapore, the transaction flows through Citi’s internal tokenized deposit network — debiting a tokenized deposit in New York and crediting one in Singapore — rather than through the correspondent banking chain. Settlement is instantaneous. The cost is a fraction of correspondent bank fees.

The early production client is instructive: Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company, uses Citi Token Services for trade finance settlement — a use case where payment certainty and speed directly affect the movement of physical goods. When a container ship arrives at port, the cargo release depends on payment of freight charges and associated fees. A Citi Token Services payment that settles in seconds means the cargo moves sooner; a correspondent banking payment that settles in days means the container sits on the dock, accumulating demurrage charges. For Maersk, Citi Token Services is not a technology experiment — it is a competitive advantage in the operational mechanics of global shipping.

The addressable market for Citi Token Services is substantial. Cross-border wholesale payments represent approximately $150 billion per day globally. Even capturing a small share of that volume through the tokenized deposit network generates significant revenue while demonstrating the operational benefits that drive broader client adoption.

BNY Mellon: Opening Institutional Custody to Digital Assets

BNY Mellon occupies a unique and strategically critical position in the institutional tokenization landscape. As the world’s largest custodian, with $46 trillion in assets under custody, BNY Mellon holds a position in the institutional value chain that cannot be easily replicated: the trusted third party that holds assets on behalf of institutional investors who cannot or will not hold assets themselves.

Pension funds, endowments, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds are required by law, regulation, or investment policy to use qualified custodians for their holdings. This requirement — rooted in investor protection principles established by the SEC under the Investment Company Act and Advisers Act — means that the universe of institutions eligible to hold institutional assets is small and heavily credentialed. BNY Mellon holds custody relationships with virtually every major institutional investor in the United States.

BNY Mellon’s Digital Asset Custody service, launched in October 2022, was the first offering by a major US bank to receive approval from both the SEC and the New York Department of Financial Services to hold digital assets for institutional clients. This dual regulatory approval is not a bureaucratic footnote — it is the credential that enables pension funds, insurance companies, and endowments operating under Reg D fiduciary standards to hold tokenized assets. Without a qualified custodian approved to hold digital assets, institutional investors subject to qualified custodian requirements simply cannot invest in tokenized securities, regardless of how compelling the return profile.

BNY Mellon’s digital custody partnership with Fireblocks provides the underlying technical infrastructure — Fireblocks’ MPC key management ensures that private keys controlling institutional digital asset positions never exist in a single location, eliminating the single-point-of-failure risk that has resulted in billions in losses at less sophisticated digital asset custodians.

The Interoperability Challenge

The proliferation of institutional tokenization platforms — each built on different technology stacks, serving different client bases, and optimized for different use cases — has created a fragmentation problem that increasingly constrains the market’s development. A bond issued on GS DAP cannot be posted as collateral on Kinexys without an off-chain bridge. A BUIDL token held at Fireblocks cannot be seamlessly transferred to an Aave position without manual intervention at the custody layer.

This fragmentation is the most significant medium-term constraint on the $16 trillion tokenization vision. The promise of tokenization — seamless, programmable, composable assets that flow across institutions, blockchains, and jurisdictions — requires interoperability between platforms that currently operate as closed networks. The infrastructure firms that solve this interoperability problem will capture substantial value.

Several approaches are competing. SWIFT — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — has conducted multiple experiments connecting blockchain-based settlement networks to the existing SWIFT messaging infrastructure, enabling transactions that originate on one chain to trigger corresponding settlements on legacy systems. SWIFT’s position as the universal messaging standard for institutional finance gives it unique leverage to serve as the interoperability layer between tokenized platforms.

Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) enables tokenized assets to move between different blockchain networks — a technical capability that the institutional market needs if it is to avoid choosing between Ethereum, Avalanche, Stellar, and Provenance. SWIFT’s partnership with Chainlink — testing CCIP for cross-chain securities settlement using SWIFT’s existing connectivity — represents the most important interoperability development in institutional tokenization as of 2026.

The DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation), which processes over $2.5 quadrillion in securities transactions annually through its traditional systems, is building a tokenization platform called Project Ion that could eventually serve as the digital settlement layer for the existing equity market. Project Ion’s advantage is the DTCC’s existing participant network — if DTCC tokenizes equity settlement, it brings every US broker-dealer along without requiring individual adoption decisions.

State Street and the Asset Servicer Imperative

State Street, the second-largest custodian bank in the US with $45 trillion in assets under custody, has been slower than BNY Mellon to achieve production digital asset custody status but has invested heavily in the fund administration layer of tokenization infrastructure. State Street’s Digital Finance division focuses on the operational side: automating fund NAV calculations, corporate actions processing, and investor record-keeping for tokenized funds.

The opportunity for State Street and comparable asset servicers is substantial. Every tokenized fund — whether BlackRock’s BUIDL, a tokenized private equity fund from KKR, or a tokenized REIT from a real estate manager — requires ongoing fund administration: calculating net asset value, processing subscriptions and redemptions, distributing dividends, maintaining investor records, producing regulatory reports. These services currently generate approximately $15-20 billion annually in fees for State Street, BNY Mellon, and their competitors. Tokenization changes the economics of these services — automating some functions (yield distribution, investor record updates) while creating new service requirements (blockchain monitoring, smart contract oversight, on-chain compliance verification).

State Street’s bet is that the fund administration layer remains valuable even as tokenization automates the most routine components of fund operations — and that institutions which master both the blockchain technical layer and the traditional regulatory compliance layer will capture more of the tokenization infrastructure revenue than pure-play blockchain technology firms that lack the regulatory infrastructure and client relationships.

The Path to $16 Trillion

BCG’s $16 trillion estimate for tokenized global financial assets by 2030 implies a compound annual growth rate from the current $36 billion baseline of approximately 150% per year for four years — a growth trajectory that requires not incremental adoption but transformative market expansion. McKinsey’s more conservative estimate of $2 trillion for tokenized securities and funds by 2030 implies a still-extraordinary CAGR but acknowledges the friction of regulatory, technical, and institutional change.

Three constraints determine which trajectory materializes:

Regulatory clarity is the enabling constraint. The institutional investors who represent the majority of the $16 trillion target — pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds — cannot allocate to tokenized assets without legal certainty about asset ownership, custody arrangements, and tax treatment. The 2025-2026 SEC posture shift and the pending GENIUS Act stablecoin legislation are moving the regulatory environment in the right direction. The pace of regulatory clarity directly determines the pace of institutional allocation.

Secondary market liquidity is the adoption constraint. Institutional investors do not buy illiquid assets at the same price they pay for liquid ones. As ATS infrastructure matures and secondary market depth improves, the liquidity discount applied to tokenized securities will compress — lowering the effective cost of capital for tokenized asset issuers and improving risk-adjusted returns for institutional buyers.

Legal certainty on smart contract enforceability is the structural constraint. A bond issued via smart contract needs courts to recognize the smart contract’s terms as legally binding — otherwise the bond’s programmed coupon payments and maturity are only as reliable as the issuer’s voluntary compliance. The Uniform Law Commission’s 2022 amendments to the Uniform Commercial Code, which 24 states have now adopted, provide a legal framework for digital asset ownership and smart contract enforceability. As more states adopt the UCC amendments, the legal infrastructure for institutional tokenization strengthens.

The institutions that have invested ahead of clarity — JPMorgan, Goldman, BNY Mellon, Broadridge — are positioned to capture a disproportionate share of the infrastructure revenue as those constraints lift. Their production deployments, client networks, and regulatory relationships cannot be replicated quickly by late entrants. The infrastructure competition for tokenized finance is substantially decided; the market competition is just beginning.

For the full landscape of secondary markets that will be needed to complement this institutional infrastructure, see our tokenized securities secondary markets analysis. For BlackRock’s BUIDL fund — which sits atop this Wall Street infrastructure — see our BUIDL deep dive. For the DeFi layer where institutional tokenized assets are increasingly deployed, see our TradFi-DeFi convergence analysis.

External authority references: BCG — Relevance of On-Chain Asset Tokenization and BIS — The Tokenisation of Financial Assets: Definitions, Benefits, and Risks.

Donovan Vanderbilt is the founder of The Vanderbilt Portfolio, an independent intelligence network covering institutional finance and digital asset markets. This analysis is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.