Tokenization is moving from a concept to a multi-billion-dollar market and central banks are rebuilding settlements around programmable platforms. The case for specialized blockchain infrastructure, rather than one universal chain, is getting stronger, not weaker.
In its 2025 Annual Economic Report, the Bank for International Settlements called tokenization the basis for “the next-generation monetary and financial system.” By mid-2025, on-chain tokenized real-world assets excluding stablecoins had surpassed roughly $24 billion, up from about $5 billion in 2022. Stablecoin supply crossed $290 billion. The Atlantic Council counted 137 countries exploring central bank digital currencies, with 49 active pilots.
These numbers describe a market that is rapidly outgrowing the assumption it was built on, namely that one blockchain would eventually do everything for everyone. It will not, and the reasons are structural.
The trilemma shapes every design choice
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin gave the industry its most useful frame more than five years ago with the so-called “scalability trilemma.” At the base layer, a blockchain cannot simultaneously maximize decentralization, security and scalability. There has to be at least one trade-off. Bitcoin chose security and decentralization at the cost of throughput, processing roughly seven transactions per second. Ethereum’s base layer has historically operated around 15 to 30 transactions per second, which is precisely why most retail activity has migrated to Layer-2 rollups. Higher-throughput Layer-1 networks took the opposite path, accepting more concentrated validator sets in exchange for speed.
Every serious blockchain is, in effect, a different answer to the same question. That is also why the internet itself never converged on a single protocol. TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP and others coexist because they solve different problems. Distributed ledgers are following the same logic.
The market has already chosen specialization
A quick scan of today’s landscape highlights the point. Bitcoin facilitates value preservation. Ethereum and its peers host most general-purpose smart contract activity and the regulated tokenized fund issuances led by names like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton. Permissioned networks such as Hyperledger Fabric and R3 Corda underpin most bank-led tokenization, because confidentiality and role-based permissions were design requirements from day one. High-throughput chains target payments and consumer-scale applications. Beyond those, a growing list of specialized ecosystems serves stablecoin payments, gaming, CBDCs, tokenized commodities, treasuries and private credit. No single architecture optimizes for all of these, and pretending otherwise has been one of the industry’s more expensive lessons.
Where today’s networks fall short
The limitations are well documented in the regulatory literature. Liquidity fragmentation across chains and the absence of common identification standards have been flagged explicitly by the OECD as barriers to institutional adoption. On the payments side, the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database recorded a global average remittance cost of 6.36% in mid-2025, well above the G20 and UN target of 5%. Slow, expensive cross-border payments remain the single most visible problem that blockchain is supposed to solve, and at scale it frequently does not.
The compliance gap is just as real. The BIS, the IMF and IOSCO have all argued, in different terms, that permissionless networks as currently designed cannot fully accommodate the AML, KYC and consumer-protection obligations of regulated finance. That is why most institutional tokenization has so far happened in permissioned environments, and why the BIS in 2025 stated that today’s stablecoins still fall short on the three foundational tests of money, namely singleness, elasticity and integrity. Add the persistent onboarding friction, key management complexity and bridge risk that still define the end-user experience, and the picture is fairly clear. These are not problems any one chain can solve in isolation.
Why the industry keeps building
New architectures keep appearing not because the industry is restless, but because applications genuinely demand different trade-offs. A CBDC platform that has to satisfy a central bank’s operational and legal requirements cannot be the same system that hosts an open consumer game. A tokenized money-market fund used as collateral by a global bank cannot run on the same fee curve as a micropayment for streaming media.
This is why heterogeneous, multi-chain architectures, including the model that we have developed at Venom Foundation with a coordinating master layer and customizable workchains for public, private and consortium use cases, have become a recognizable design pattern. It is also why the BIS’s Project Agorá, which connects seven central banks and more than 40 private institutions around a unified ledger concept, deliberately avoids forcing every participant to use identical infrastructure.
The emerging-market dimension
The next phase of adoption will not be decided primarily in New York or Frankfurt. India’s digital rupee circulation grew more than 300% year-on-year through March 2025. China’s e-CNY remains the largest CBDC pilot by transaction volume. Regulators in the UAE, Singapore and Hong Kong have introduced some of the clearest tokenization frameworks anywhere.
For emerging markets, the appeal of this technology is concrete: lower-cost remittances, more efficient capital markets, and digitized public-sector services. But it only works if the underlying networks are compliant by design, performant under real load, and able to interoperate with both legacy and new financial rails. That is the bar the industry must meet.
A measured outlook
Over the next decade, blockchain is more likely to resemble the modern internet than consist of a single dominant chain. Bitcoin will continue to anchor monetary credibility. Public smart-contract platforms will host most permissionless innovation. Permissioned and consortium chains will sit underneath regulated financial infrastructure. Specialized chains will serve payments, gaming, tokenization and CBDCs. Connecting these layers securely, compliantly, and without recreating today’s fragmentation, is the real challenge of the next ten years.
We should be honest that we are still early. The infrastructure being built today will outlast most of the projects building it. That is exactly why architectural decisions matter, and why the question is no longer “which blockchain will win,” but “which set of interoperable systems best serves which need.”
