Speaking at the Eurex Derivatives Insights Asia event in Singapore on Tuesday, panellists reflected on the growth of tokenisation and the barriers that remain for it to scale.

Alice Chan, co-founder, InvestaX, said that the world of tokenisation has moved from one of poor quality assets and smoke and mirrors to that of more legal certainty and collateral mobilisation.

"Traditional finance is understanding the benefits for products to be tokenised to gain efficiencies of being onchain," she said. "The connectivity to decentralised finance and removal of friction offer a huge proposition for clients."

She noted that tokenised money market funds and Treasuries are early adopters of tokenisation in traditional finance while real estate offers huge potential.

Adrian Song, digital assets senior analyst, Schroders, said that tokenisation has been client driven, particularly those who are digitally native and already have distributed ledger technology (DLT) infrastructure and the ease of using DLT has created demand for more products.

"While traditional finance clients are still trying to see the value in moving products to tokenised form, DLT provides one leap where innovation can offer value like liquidity, instantaneous settlement, and 24/7 trading," he said.

He added: "Cash drives everything and once that's moved to the digital form, the rest of the assets will follow."

The panellists highlighted the recent example of stablecoin issuer licences approved by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. HSBC and a consortium backed by Standard Chartered Bank are the first entities to receive the licence and issuance is expected to take place in the second half of 2026.

While HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank are both physical currency issuers in Hong Kong, what will be interesting to keep an eye on are the entities that are next in line to be granted licences and whether they go beyond traditional financial institutions.

Kris Hopkins, deputy head of APAC sales, Eurex, said that for tokenisation to scale, key barriers such as market infrastructure fragmentation and siloed regulation will need to be overcome.

Patrick Tan, general counsel and co-founder, ChainArgos, said that there remains an information gap and to further unlock liquidity, education will be key.

Nasdaq has partnered with Boerse Stuttgart Group’s Seturion platform to support settlement of tokenised securities using distributed ledger infrastructure.

US banking regulators have confirmed that securities issued or represented using distributed ledger technology should generally receive the same capital treatment as their traditional equivalents.