The Companies Building Tokenized Finance

Institutional involvement in tokenization now spans three broad categories of companies, each approaching the space from a different starting point.

Asset managers

Several of the world’s largest asset managers have launched tokenized money market funds or Treasury products, typically issued on public or permissioned blockchains and marketed as yield-bearing, dollar-denominated instruments for institutional and, increasingly, qualified individual investors. This category has driven much of the growth in tokenized Treasuries as an RWA class.

Banks

Major global banks have run tokenization pilots concentrated on wholesale use cases: tokenized deposits for near-instant interbank settlement, repo transactions settled atomically onchain, and collateral that can move between counterparties faster than traditional custodial transfers allow. Most of these programs remain in pilot or limited-production phases rather than full public rollout.

Infrastructure providers

Separate from banks and asset managers, a group of specialized technology companies supplies the issuance platforms, custody solutions, oracle networks and interoperability tools that institutional tokenization programs rely on. These providers often work behind the scenes, integrated into a bank’s or asset manager’s own branded product rather than facing investors directly.

The overall trend

Rather than a single dominant path, tokenized finance is developing through parallel efforts from asset managers building yield products, banks modernizing settlement infrastructure, and specialized vendors supplying the technical plumbing connecting them — a pattern more consistent with infrastructure modernization than with a single company or product category taking over the market.