Fidelity’s Matthew Horne Declares Institutional Tokenization Push Irreversible

Institutions aren’t going back. That’s pretty much the blunt message Matthew Horne, head of digital asset strategists at Fidelity Investments, delivered at a panel in Singapore — and the numbers behind him make it hard to argue otherwise.

Horne said the move toward an onchain future among institutional investors has become irreversible over the past 18 months. US asset managers, he added, are especially motivated by the more accessible investor pathways that tokenization opens up, giving them cleaner entry into markets that were previously slow or expensive to reach. It’s a structural argument as much as a market one — tokenization isn’t just a new product wrapper, it’s a different way of building financial plumbing. And once you rebuild the pipes, you don’t rip them out. Demand for tokenized assets has surged 41% over the past month alone, with the number of holders now exceeding 493,000, per data from RWA.xyz. That figure covers addresses holding tokenized real-world assets and excludes stablecoins.

Big numbers. Fast movement.

UBS, Securitize, and the Race to Build Distribution

Ka Yan Chan from UBS, also speaking at the Singapore panel, made the case that treasuries and equities have the potential to pull substantial capital onchain as they become standard pieces of portfolio construction. Chan’s broader point was that firms can build real businesses here — not just by holding tokenized assets, but by developing the distribution layers that sit around them. Service providers, custodians, infrastructure builders. There’s a whole ecosystem still being assembled.

Securitize is already moving. The firm launched trading for tokenized shares of a dozen widely held US stocks, a concrete step that turns what’s been mostly a theoretical conversation into something retail and institutional investors can actually touch. It’s not a small thing — bringing equities onchain at that scale requires regulatory clearance, technical infrastructure, and enough market confidence to attract real volume. Securitize seems to have cleared enough of those hurdles to go live.

The SEC’s role in all of this is murky but increasingly important.

SEC Actions Open the Door — Carefully

In December 2025, the SEC issued a “no action” letter to a subsidiary of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, allowing it to offer a new securities market tokenization service. That’s a meaningful signal. No-action letters aren’t approvals exactly, but they tell the market that the regulator won’t come after you for doing the thing — which in practice is close enough to a green light for institutions that have compliance teams to satisfy.

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And then there’s the temporary exemption. The SEC granted one in September, permitting limited trading of tokenized US stocks on specific onchain venues. Temporary, yes. Limited, yes. But it’s the kind of precedent that tends to expand over time rather than contract. Regulators don’t usually hand out exemptions to then shut the whole thing down. Probably.

These two moves together — the DTCC subsidiary letter and the trading exemption — basically gave the market a framework to operate within. Not a complete one. There are still plenty of gaps, and the rules around custody, reporting, and cross-border activity for tokenized securities remain unclear in a lot of jurisdictions. But enough of a framework to build on.

Over $1.2 billion moved onchain in the past 30 days, pushing the total across stablecoins and tokenized assets past $323 billion, per OnchainBenchmark. That’s not a test anymore. That’s a market.

The $4 Trillion Target and What It Actually Means

Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick put a number on where this goes: $4 trillion in tokenized real-world assets by the end of 2028. It’s a big projection, and projections like this one are always worth treating with some skepticism — the path from $323 billion to $4 trillion involves a lot of regulatory decisions, infrastructure build-out, and institutional appetite that hasn’t fully materialized yet.

But the direction seems clear enough. Fidelity and UBS aren’t running small experiments. The SEC isn’t handing out no-action letters for fun. Securitize didn’t build a full trading platform for tokenized equities on a bet that the market would stay niche.

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What’s less clear is the timeline. Kendrick’s 2028 figure implies fast, sustained growth across multiple asset classes — equities, treasuries, credit, real estate, probably more. Each of those categories has its own regulatory complexity, its own liquidity dynamics, its own investor base. Getting all of them onchain at scale, in a way that actually works for institutional portfolios, is harder than any single launch makes it look.

And the infrastructure question is real. Distribution layers, as Chan put it, still need to be built. Custody solutions need to mature. Settlement finality on public or permissioned chains needs to be legally recognized in more markets. None of that is impossible — but none of it is done yet either.

Horne’s point at Singapore cuts through most of the noise, though. Institutions have spent 18 months committing real resources to tokenization. 493,000 holders. $323 billion onchain. A SEC exemption for stock trading. A DTCC subsidiary with a no-action letter in hand.