Unlocking allocator access to tokenisation | by David Jenkins | Jul, 2025

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Due to the fractional work I am doing on Impact investment (ImpactX Markets), I had the opportunity to attend the Digital Finance CRC (DFCRC) leadership summit last week in Sydney. While I was there primarily in that role, hearing Michael Karbouris talk inspirationally about maintaining our planetary boundaries (hot tip, we are not) and targeting natural capital allocators to help get our planet back on track, what was inescapable was Project Acacia, the joint venture on digital money between the DFCRC and the Reserve Bank of Australia.

In fact, with the backdrop of the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts passing the US Senate, it’s hardly possibly to escape the topic of stable-coins and digital asset markets at all.

During the excellent presentation by Talis Putnins on traditional and emerging financial systems, what became apparent to me, was the place where the worlds of impact investment and digital assets intersect (aka. where the mega-trends of private markets, real-world asset tokenisation and fractionalisation converge).

Among the clamour and noise around stable-coins and particularly their purpose in payments, it’s easy to lose sight of that enormous opportunity, tokenisation of primary and secondary markets particularly as they pertain to retail participation, private markets and real-world assets. Which according to various reports, could be a multi-trillion dollar market globally by 2030.

With billions of dollars in Australia alone flowing into private markets, as described in the ASIC paper, and potentially much more on the table through tokenisation, gaining access to efficient markets requires addressing a fragmented and inefficient traditional finance capital formation process which has concentrated platform gatekeeping in the retail and wealth sector, intermediary and counter-party risk in the middle, and is based on legacy and inflexible asset allocation processes and benchmarks in the institutions (i.e. Strategic Asset Allocation — SAA).

While this system seems to work perfectly well, the issue lies in the uneven distribution of opportunity and data in the system, where benchmarks may inadvertently be constructed to prevent impact and thematic investing, high entry points may prevent deeply liquid markets, and platform concentration may limit capital raising distribution for issuers.

What I would be so bold as to suggest then, that the answer to unlock all this nascent opportunity, is to unlock retail and institutional asset allocators into Real-World Asset Tokenisation (RWAT).

There is plenty of literature on the topic of RWAT and how it allows fractionalised and liquid markets, real-time information dissemination and creation of new secondary markets out of illiquid assets. My goal here is not to reiterate those things or plagiarise their ideas, but rather to pique some interest in what needs to be done to unlock trillions of dollars in private markets, as well as unlock thematic investment (aka. TPM — Total Portfolio Management) for institutional, wealth and retail alike.

The reason I talk of unlocking asset allocators, is because there are boundaries to what they can participate in with regards to digital assets.

• Superannuation or pension funds literally cannot touch digitised tokens real-world or otherwise, simply because they are nowhere on official or commonly accepted benchmarks, have unreliable and patchy data (often synthetically generated) and have no actuarial or research oversight.
• Sophisticated and wholesale retail also cannot get on-platform access to digital tokens, because they are not listed on all wealth advisor platforms, and there is limited construct within digital assets natively for managed accounts. The wholesale retail market is the realm of platforms (e.g. Netwealth, Praemium, Mason Stevens etc.), and while high-net-worth and family office may be able to ‘write a cheque’ directly off-platform, most are provided access through the platform to be included in client and model portfolios.
• Asset managers do not have independently rated products that can combine digitised assets into structured risk/return or thematic lenses. The lack of these products means that the ‘traditional money’, is still largely locked out of the digital ecosystem.
• Traditional research advisors, asset consultants and actuarial firms have bare coverage of this new emergent financial system and as consequence cannot advise on their allocation to the trustees. It could also be said at least historically, that it has potentially been seen as somewhat of a career limiting move getting involved in ‘crypto’.

To address some of the boundaries starts with some demystification. I really enjoyed the ‘Behind The Scenes’ commentary by Austin Campbell covering the inside story of the GENIUS and CLARITY acts. The humorous take of replacing ‘blockchain’ in your conversations with ‘shared excel spreadsheet’, really helps to demystify the conversation. In the same fashion replace ‘stable-coin’ with ‘tethered asset’, where that tethered asset could be virtually anything of value. A stock, a basket of stocks, a property, a building, a combination of all of these, then with that combination, publicly accessible data that is settled instantly into truly democratised portfolio construction tools. For as an industry sometimes guilty of speaking in ‘koans’ truly it can be demystified into something quite straightforward and practical to understand.

The winners here will be those portfolio construction tools that provide access to a new suite of structured products based on tethered assets, the research houses, oracles or data vendors that can provide the relevant coverage, and the venues that can create secondary liquid markets and price discovery. There are a host of emerging platforms and protocols here from Arbitrum to XRP Ledger, but there is no one, or alliance, yet, that has solved the workflow from issuer to allocator to marketplace. That space remains up for grabs for someone to own while most in digital assets are distracted on breadth of offering over depth of offering.

So, among the excitement about payments (don’t get me wrong, trillions of dollars of excitement and economic gas), let’s remember also that unlocking portfolio allocators into tethered assets remains a massive opportunity likely to spin off opportunities as yet unimagined, into secondaries markets, when none such exist today.

As much as I am a realist, and there is a long road ahead, it’s hard not to get excited about where this could go. Beyond what has largely been a speculators market, the blockchain and crypto-asset marketplace is growing up fast to the point that you can see a new financial services landscape in the throes of its formation.

#digitalassets #crypto #realworldassettokenization #rwat #privatemarkets #impactinvestment