In March 2024, BlackRock launched BUIDL, a tokenised US Treasury money market fund, on the Ethereum blockchain. Within six months, the fund held over $500 million in assets. The product itself was unremarkable: a money market fund investing in short-term government debt. What made it significant was the delivery mechanism. Fund shares existed as blockchain tokens. They could be transferred 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with settlement completing in seconds. Traditional money market fund shares settle in one to two business days and can only be traded during market hours. The global blockchain market is valued at $31.18 billion in 2025, according to Fortune Business Insights, and the innovations driving that figure are not abstract concepts. They are live products handling real capital.
Tokenised Securities: Making Illiquid Assets Tradeable
Tokenisation converts ownership rights in an asset (a bond, a share, a property, a fund unit) into a digital token on a blockchain. The token represents the same legal claim as a traditional certificate or registry entry, but it can be transferred instantly, subdivided into fractions, and programmed with automated compliance rules.
The practical effect is liquidity. Private equity funds, which typically lock investor capital for seven to ten years, can issue tokenised shares that trade on secondary markets. A venture capital investor who needs to exit a position before the fund matures can sell tokens to another qualified buyer without negotiating a bespoke transfer with the fund manager.
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.
According to CoinGecko’s 2024 annual crypto report, total cryptocurrency market capitalisation exceeded $3.5 trillion by the end of 2024, reflecting renewed institutional interest following spot ETF approvals in the United States.
By late 2024, the total market for tokenised real-world assets (excluding stablecoins) exceeded $5 billion. Franklin Templeton’s OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund operated on Stellar and Polygon with over $400 million in assets. WisdomTree launched tokenised fund products on Ethereum. Hamilton Lane tokenised a portion of its direct equity fund, making a minimum investment of $20,000 possible in a product class that traditionally required $5 million.
The BFSI sector accounts for 23.52% of total blockchain market revenue, per Fortune Business Insights. Tokenised securities are a primary driver of that share, because they address a real problem (illiquidity in private markets) rather than solving for a theoretical one.
Central Bank Digital Currencies
Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) represent the most direct intersection of blockchain technology and government-backed money. Unlike stablecoins, which are issued by private companies and backed by reserves, CBDCs are issued by central banks and carry the same legal status as physical banknotes.
China’s digital yuan (e-CNY) is the most advanced CBDC programme. The People’s Bank of China began its pilot in 2020, and by 2024, cumulative transaction volume exceeded 7 billion e-CNY (roughly $1 billion) distributed through merchant partnerships, government subsidies, and public lotteries. The digital yuan operates on a permissioned blockchain controlled by the central bank, with commercial banks acting as distributors.
The European Central Bank is developing the digital euro, with a preparation phase running from October 2023 through 2025. The design calls for offline capability (allowing transactions without internet connectivity), privacy protections for small-value payments, and interoperability with existing payment systems. The ECB has stated that the digital euro would complement, not replace, physical cash.
The Bank for International Settlements reported that 130 countries, representing 98% of global GDP, were exploring CBDCs by 2023. The motivations vary by region. Advanced economies focus on payment system efficiency and financial inclusion. Emerging economies are more concerned with reducing reliance on the US dollar for cross-border trade and providing banking access to unbanked populations.
Programmable Money and Smart Financial Products
Programmable money is the concept that currency itself can carry instructions. A blockchain-based payment can include conditions: release funds only when a specific event occurs, split payment automatically among multiple recipients, or enforce spending restrictions without requiring a third party to monitor compliance.
This capability is already in production. Ethereum smart contracts power lending protocols that automatically adjust interest rates based on supply and demand. Aave manages over $12 billion in deposits using smart contracts that have never required manual intervention for core functions. The code sets rates, processes loans, and liquidates collateral without a loan officer, risk committee, or IT support team.
For corporate treasury, programmable money solves specific workflow problems. A company can programme a smart contract to pay suppliers automatically when goods are received (verified by an IoT sensor or a shipment tracking API), eliminating the invoice-approval-payment cycle that currently takes 30 to 90 days. Supply chain finance platforms like Centrifuge and Goldfinch use blockchain-based programmable payments to speed up B2B transactions.
Government disbursement is another application. Singapore’s Project Orchid explored “purpose-bound money,” where government vouchers issued as blockchain tokens could only be spent at approved merchants and within a specified timeframe. The vouchers expired automatically after the deadline, and unused funds returned to the treasury without manual reconciliation.
The payments application segment accounts for 25.45% of blockchain market revenue, making it the largest use case. Programmable money is the innovation within payments that distinguishes blockchain from faster versions of existing rails. A real-time gross settlement system can move money quickly. It cannot programme conditions into the money itself.
Embedded Finance on Blockchain Rails
Embedded finance, the integration of financial services into non-financial platforms, is being rebuilt on blockchain infrastructure. The first generation of embedded finance (Shopify Capital, Uber’s driver debit card, Apple Pay) operated on traditional banking rails with fintech companies acting as intermediaries between platforms and banks.
Blockchain-based embedded finance removes some of those intermediaries. A gaming platform can issue in-game currencies as blockchain tokens that players trade on decentralised exchanges. An e-commerce marketplace can offer instant vendor financing through a smart contract that evaluates seller performance data on-chain. A gig economy platform can pay workers in stablecoins at the moment a task is completed, rather than batching payments weekly through ACH.
Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge in October 2024 is an embedded finance play. Bridge provides stablecoin payment infrastructure that other companies embed into their products. A platform using Bridge can accept payments in one currency, settle in USDC on a blockchain, and deliver funds to the recipient in their local currency, all through a single API integration.
Blockchain-as-a-Service platforms, which account for 51.72% of market revenue, enable this kind of embedded integration. Companies do not need to build blockchain infrastructure from scratch. They subscribe to a BaaS provider (IBM, AWS, R3) and connect blockchain capabilities to their existing technology stack.
What Determines Whether These Innovations Scale
Regulatory frameworks are the most important variable. The EU’s MiCA regulation, fully effective since December 2024, created a unified licensing framework for digital assets across all member states. Companies operating in the EU know exactly what rules apply. In the United States, regulatory ambiguity persists. The SEC, CFTC, and state regulators have overlapping and sometimes contradictory jurisdictions over digital assets.
Interoperability between blockchains is the second factor. A tokenised bond on Ethereum cannot easily interact with a payment system on Solana or a CBDC on a central bank’s private ledger. SWIFT’s blockchain interoperability experiments, which began in late 2023, aim to create bridges between these networks. If successful, they would allow assets and payments to flow across blockchains as easily as messages flow across the existing SWIFT network.
North America holds 43.80% of the global blockchain market. The region’s dominance reflects its concentration of technology infrastructure, venture capital, and large financial institutions willing to invest in new settlement and issuance mechanisms. Whether the $577 billion market projection for 2034 materialises depends less on the technology itself, which is functional, and more on whether regulators and institutions agree on standards that let these innovations operate at the scale of existing financial markets.
