Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, told shareholders in his 2024 annual letter that tokenisation of financial assets would be “the next generation for markets.” Within months, BlackRock launched BUIDL, a tokenised Treasury fund that exceeded $500 million in assets on Ethereum. When the CEO of a company managing $10 trillion in assets describes blockchain-based financial services as the future of markets, the statement carries weight proportional to the capital behind it. The global blockchain market is projected to grow from $31.18 billion in 2025 to $577.36 billion by 2034, per Fortune Business Insights, at a 36.50% compound annual growth rate. The financial services that will drive most of that growth are already taking shape.
Tokenised Everything
Tokenisation, the process of representing financial assets as blockchain tokens, is the application most likely to reshape financial services over the next decade. The current market for tokenised real-world assets (excluding stablecoins) exceeded $5 billion in 2024. Boston Consulting Group and other research firms estimate this could reach $10 to $16 trillion by 2030.
The first wave of tokenisation focused on the simplest assets: money market funds and government bonds. BlackRock’s BUIDL and Franklin Templeton’s OnChain proved the model works. These products hold the same underlying assets as their traditional counterparts but offer 24/7 redemption, instant settlement, and lower minimum investments.
Data from Chainalysis’s 2024 Global Crypto Adoption Index shows that emerging markets in South and Southeast Asia continue to lead grassroots cryptocurrency adoption, driven by remittance use cases and limited access to traditional banking services.
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The second wave, now beginning, targets more complex assets. Private equity funds are being tokenised to provide secondary market liquidity. Hamilton Lane reduced its minimum investment from $5 million to $20,000 through tokenisation. Real estate is being fractionalised, allowing investors to buy tokens representing ownership in specific properties or portfolios. Infrastructure assets (toll roads, solar farms, data centres) are being tokenised to give institutional investors more granular exposure than traditional infrastructure funds provide.
The third wave, still theoretical, would tokenise everything that has value and restricted transferability: carbon credits, intellectual property, supply chain receivables, insurance policies, and loyalty points. Each of these represents value that is currently locked in proprietary systems. Tokenisation makes that value portable, tradeable, and programmable.
Autonomous Financial Operations
Smart contracts already automate specific financial functions: Aave manages $12 billion in lending without loan officers, Uniswap processes trades without a matching engine, and MakerDAO manages a stablecoin without a central bank. The next phase extends this automation to more complex financial operations.
Autonomous treasury management would allow a corporate treasury to optimise its cash position across currencies, banks, and yield opportunities through smart contracts that execute without human intervention. A smart contract could sweep idle cash into overnight lending protocols, hedge currency exposure through decentralised options, and rebalance holdings based on predicted cash flow needs.
Autonomous compliance would embed regulatory rules into financial infrastructure. A tokenised bond that cannot be sold to non-accredited investors does not need a compliance team to review each trade. The restriction is in the code. A cross-border payment that requires sanctions screening does not need a manual review queue. The screening happens at the protocol level before the payment is processed.
For fintech companies, autonomous operations reduce the marginal cost of serving each customer toward zero. A neobank that automates lending, compliance, and portfolio management through smart contracts can serve 100 million customers with the same operational headcount needed for 10 million under a manual model. This economic advantage is why blockchain-native fintech companies will outcompete traditional institutions on unit economics.
Embedded Financial Services on Blockchain
Embedded finance, the integration of financial services into non-financial platforms, generated over $50 billion in revenue in 2024. The first generation ran on traditional banking rails: Shopify Capital (merchant lending), Uber’s driver debit card (payroll), and Apple Pay (payments). The next generation will run on blockchain rails.
A gaming platform can issue in-game currencies as blockchain tokens with real economic value, tradeable on decentralised exchanges. An e-commerce marketplace can offer instant vendor financing through a smart contract that evaluates seller performance data on-chain. A social media platform can enable peer-to-peer payments, tipping, and subscription payments through stablecoin transfers.
Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge provides the infrastructure for blockchain-based embedded finance at scale. Any platform integrating Stripe can now access stablecoin payment capabilities through the same API they use for card payments. The blockchain is invisible to both the platform and its users.
Blockchain-based cross-border payments handle approximately $3 trillion annually, growing at 45% per year, per Coinlaw. Embedded finance will expand this volume significantly because it integrates payments into contexts where traditional banking rails are too expensive, too slow, or too complex to embed.
Decentralised Identity as Financial Infrastructure
Financial services depend on identity verification. Every account opening, every transaction above reporting thresholds, every cross-border payment requires the institution to verify who the customer is. This verification costs $6 billion annually across the global financial industry and creates friction that limits access, particularly in developing countries where government-issued identity documents are unreliable or unavailable.
Blockchain-based decentralised identity (DID) creates portable, verifiable credentials that travel with the user. A customer verified by one institution can share that verification with another through an on-chain attestation. The customer controls their identity data and grants access to specific attributes without revealing everything to every institution.
Zero-knowledge proofs extend this further. A user can prove they are over 18, a resident of a specific country, or an accredited investor without revealing their name, date of birth, or financial statements. Polygon ID provides this capability for financial applications. The Ethereum Attestation Service provides on-chain verification that any institution can check.
For the unbanked (1.4 billion adults globally, according to the World Bank), decentralised identity could provide access to financial services without traditional documentation. A person with a verified blockchain identity can open a wallet, receive stablecoin payments, access lending protocols, and build a verifiable financial history without a bank account.
What Determines the Timeline
Three factors will determine how quickly blockchain-driven financial services reach mainstream adoption.
Regulatory convergence is the most important. The EU’s MiCA provides a template that other jurisdictions may follow. If the US passes comprehensive digital asset legislation, it would accelerate institutional adoption globally. If regulatory fragmentation persists, adoption will be slower and geographically uneven.
Interoperability between blockchain networks is the second factor. Tokenised assets, payments, and identity credentials must flow between different blockchains (Ethereum, Solana, private institutional networks, CBDCs) for the full value of blockchain-driven finance to be realised. SWIFT’s interoperability initiative, Chainlink’s CCIP, and other cross-chain protocols are working on this, but a universal standard has not yet emerged.
User experience is the third. Account abstraction, intent-based interfaces, and invisible blockchain integration (like Stripe’s Bridge) are making blockchain financial services accessible to non-technical users. The pace of UX improvement will determine whether blockchain-driven services remain niche or become mainstream.
North America holds 43.80% of the global blockchain market. The BFSI sector represents 23.52% of revenue. The Blockchain-as-a-Service segment accounts for 51.72%. These numbers describe an industry in its infrastructure-building phase. The financial services that will define the next decade, tokenised assets, autonomous operations, embedded blockchain finance, and decentralised identity, are not hypothetical. They are in production, growing, and backed by the largest financial institutions in the world.
