If history is any guide, tokenisation today is roughly where the internet was in 1996. That is when Amazon had sold just $16 million worth of books, and three of the rest of today's Magnificent Seven tech giants had not even been founded. This is the sentiment of BlackRock as quoted in The Economist, December 2025.

The statement that shook Wall Street

When the CEO of the world's largest asset manager, a firm overseeing more than $13 trillion makes a bold historical comparison, it is worth sitting up and paying attention.

Larry Fink and BlackRock COO Rob Goldstein published a guest column in The Economist in late 2025, and then Fink doubled down in his annual shareholder letter in March 2026. Their message was clear, direct, and loaded with conviction. Tokenisation of real world assets is to finance what the internet was to commerce in 1996. Not a distant future. Not hype. Right now. In our current moment.

But what does that actually mean and more importantly, are they right?

Understanding tokenisation

Imagine you own a piece of prime real estate worth $2 million. Normally, selling a fraction of that property is painfully slow, expensive, and almost impossible to do in a liquid way. Now imagine that property is converted into 2,000,000 digital tokens on a blockchain and each of the digital tokens is worth just $1. Suddenly, anyone anywhere in the world can buy $50 worth of that property, trade it instantly, and earn a proportional share of its income.

That is the essence of what tokenisation is about. It is the process of recording ownership of real world assets like real estate, government bonds, company shares, private credit, commodities and even art onto a digital ledger (blockchain). The result is fractional ownership, instant settlement, 24/7 trading, and far lower transaction costs.

A bond is still a bond. A building is still a building. The only difference is ib the rails they travel on.

Why 1996? What actually happened back then

In 1996, the internet existed but most people did not fully understand what it would become. Amazon was a tiny online bookstore with just $16 million in sales. Google had not launched, Facebook was eight years away and Netflix? It was just two years from founding.

To the average person in 1996, the internet was slow, clunky, niche, and slightly confusing. The believers were labelled optimists at best, lunatics at worst.

Then came 1999, then 2004 and then 2010. The world had now been completely reorganised around a technology that people once dismissed.

Fink's argument is direct, we are in that pre boom phase with tokenisation. The infrastructure exists and the first real products are live. Also, the numbers are growing fast. But the general public and even most investors still do not fully grasp what is coming.

The numbers back them up

This is not just another poetic analogy. The data is already compelling.

The real world asset (RWA) tokenisation market grew from roughly $5 billion in 2022 to over $30 billion by Q3 2025. This is a roughly 10x increase in just three years. By early 2026, institutional momentum had not slowed. Tokenised U.S. Treasury products alone surpassed $7.3 billion in assets by mid 2025.

BlackRock's own tokenised money market fund which is known as BUIDL was launched in March 2024 and within months grew to over $2.8 billion in assets under management. This made it the largest tokenised fund in the world. Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, and BNY Mellon have all followed with their own tokenised products.

Projections from major institutions range widely but all point in the same direction. Boston Consulting Group forecasts the tokenised asset market reaching $16 trillion by 2030. Standard Chartered projects $30 trillion by 2034. Ripple and BCG jointly estimate nearly $19 trillion by 2033.

For context, global GDP in 2025 is approximately $110 trillion. These projections are not fringe optimism. They represent a fundamental restructuring of how capital flows.

What Wall Street is sctually doing right now

The clearest sign that this is real is that of the actions of the biggest financial institutions in the world. We are talking about firms that historically moved slowly and cautiously. BlackRock runs the world's largest tokenised treasury fund and has filed to tokenise its $150 billion Treasury Trust money market fund via blockchain.

JPMorgan linked its payments engine to Base (an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain) and conducted a commercial paper issuance on Solana. Goldman Sachs partnered with BNY Mellon to enable blockchain powered money market fund subscriptions. This is the first such arrangement in U.S. history.

Fidelity launched its Digital Interest Token (FDIT), backed entirely by U.S. Treasury securities, which exceeded $300 million in AUM by mid 2025. Nasdaq received SEC approval in March 2026 to enable tokenised securities trading, partnering with Kraken to distribute tokenised stocks globally.

All these are not experiments. They are production systems, being built by institutions that manage trillions of dollars in client assets. When Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon act together, the market listens.

The parallel that makes this real for everyday investors

Here is the part most people miss when thinking about the 1996 internet comparison. In 1996, the biggest early beneficiaries of the internet were NOT the people who built the infrastructure (though they made fortunes too). The biggest long term winners were ordinary people who suddenly had access to tools, markets, and information that previously only existed for the privileged few.

Small businesses could now reach global customers. Investors could trade without a broker. Students in developing countries could access the same information as those at elite universities.

Tokenisation carries the same democratising promise. Today, a private equity fund or a prime commercial property is only accessible to ultra wealthy or institutional investors. Tokenisation breaks these assets into smaller, affordable pieces. An investor in Nigeria, the Philippines, or Brazil could potentially hold a fraction of a U.S. Treasury bond or a Manhattan office building while earning yield that was previously unavailable to them.

Fink and Goldstein specifically noted in their article that early tokenisation adoption is growing fastest outside traditional Western financial centres. Its growing in developing economies where banking access is limited but smartphone penetration is high. That is exactly how the internet grew too.

The challenges 

To be balanced and useful here, we need to acknowledge the genuine obstacles.

• Interoperability is a major challenge. Different blockchain networks do not always communicate with each other. If tokenised assets on Ethereum cannot interact with those on Solana or Polygon, fragmentation limits efficiency rather than improving it.
• Regulation remains uneven globally. While the U.S., UK, Singapore, and the EU are making progress, a patchwork of rules across jurisdictions complicates cross-border transactions.
• Smart contract risk is real. Moving financial assets onto blockchain based systems introduces new attack surfaces. A 2024 incident saw a DeFi platform lose $25 million to a smart contract exploit. Security must continue to improve.
• Liquidity in secondary markets is still thin. Many tokenised assets are easy to buy but hard to sell quickly. A more robust secondary market infrastructure needs to develop.

These are problems of a young technology, not fatal flaws. The internet had all of these in 1996 too. It had poor security, no global standards and limited access. Each problem got solved, one by one, over the following decade.

How to benefit from this

If BlackRock is right and the data strongly supports their case, here is the takeaway for those of us who are already in the crypto and blockchain space:

We are still very early. Not in a speculative, hope and pray sense, but in a structural, fundamental sense. The financial system is actively being rebuilt on digital rails. That process takes years, not weeks, however, the direction is clear.

Real world asset tokenisation is not a competitor to Bitcoin or Ethereum. It is very far from these but in many cases it runs on them. It is the next phase of what blockchain technology can do when it graduates from speculation and steps into genuine utility.

The institutions that once ignored crypto are now building on it. The regulators who once dismissed it are now writing frameworks for it. The exchanges that once refused to list digital assets are now tokenising the very stocks they trade.When Larry Fink says this is 1996's internet, he is not being metaphorical. He is telling you exactly what kind of moment we are living through.

The question is, are you paying attention?

Final Thoughts and conclusion

In 1996, very few people understood that a clunky, slow online bookstore called Amazon would one day be worth $2 trillion. Very few understood that the information superhighway would eventually become the operating system of global civilisation. The ones who understood early  and acted changed their financial futures.

Tokenisation may not make everyone rich overnight. But dismissing it the way people dismissed Amazon in 1996 would be a mistake history may not forgive twice

Disclaimer: No part of this text constitutes financial advice, this text is only for educational purposes. Always do your own research.