What do you believe is preventing tokenised assets from reaching institutional-scale adoption, and where do you see the biggest remaining challenges today?
The industry often frames tokenisation as a technology challenge, but I don't believe that's true anymore. The technology is mature. What's missing is institutional confidence.
For a pension fund, family office, bank, or asset manager, the blockchain is only one component of the equation. The real questions are: who is the regulated transfer agent? Who provides qualified custody? How are corporate actions managed? How is compliance enforced? What happens in the event of litigation? How are shareholder rights protected?
Institutions don't buy tokens — they buy legal certainty. That's precisely why we designed Linework differently. Rather than building a tokenisation platform first, we built institutional market infrastructure first. Our own company is the first issuer on that infrastructure. Our tokenised common stock, LNWK, is administered through Securitize's DS Protocol, custodied by Anchorage Digital Bank — America's first federally chartered crypto bank — and governed under the same corporate standards we expect to satisfy as we pursue our planned Nasdaq listing. The partnership with Anchorage Digital is particularly important because it demonstrates that institutional tokenisation cannot rely on self-custody or lightly regulated intermediaries. Institutional capital requires bank-grade custody, treasury management, and operational resilience. Anchorage provides exactly that foundation, allowing us to combine blockchain efficiency with the security standards expected by traditional financial institutions.
The biggest challenge over the next few years will therefore not be tokenisation itself. It will be creating enough trusted infrastructure that institutions no longer perceive blockchain as an additional risk, but simply as a better operating system for capital markets.
There is growing interest in tokenising many real world assets. Which asset classes do you believe are most likely to see meaningful adoption first, and why?
The first wave will be private market securities. Private equity, venture capital, private credit, growth companies, and closely held corporate shares collectively represent tens of trillions of dollars in assets, yet they continue to operate with relatively inefficient infrastructure. Ownership transfers remain slow, secondary liquidity is limited, and administrative processes still rely heavily on manual reconciliation.
Those inefficiencies are exactly what tokenisation solves.
Rather than simply digitising ownership certificates, tokenisation embeds compliance, shareholder rights, transfer restrictions, and settlement directly into the asset itself. That significantly reduces operational complexity without changing the underlying legal framework.
We're already seeing strong institutional traction in tokenised money market funds (MMFs) and private credit because these asset classes benefit immediately from faster settlement and programmable compliance. Public examples from firms like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Apollo, KKR, and Hamilton Lane demonstrate that institutional tokenisation has moved beyond experimentation into production infrastructure. Linework deliberately chose the same institutional technology stack because we believe interoperability matters more than proprietary technology.
Real estate will also continue growing, but I think the industry initially focused too heavily on fractional ownership as the value proposition. Fractionalisation alone doesn't create value. Better governance, automated distributions, transparent ownership records, and more efficient secondary markets do.
Ultimately, every financial asset can become programmable. The sequence will simply depend on where operational inefficiencies are greatest.
Many tokenisation initiatives promise greater efficiency, transparency, and accessibility. Which of these benefits do you think is genuinely transformative, and which have perhaps been overstated by the industry?
For me, the truly transformative aspect is programmability. People often think tokenisation is about putting an existing asset onto a blockchain. That's actually the least interesting part. The real innovation comes when compliance, settlement, governance, dividend distribution, voting rights, and corporate actions become native characteristics of the asset instead of being managed across multiple disconnected institutions.
In traditional finance, those processes require custodians, registrars, transfer agents, settlement networks, and reconciliation systems working independently. Tokenisation allows many of those workflows to become synchronised around a single digital source of truth. Efficiency naturally follows from that architecture.
Transparency is also meaningful because ownership records and transaction histories become more auditable, while still respecting privacy and regulatory requirements.
Where I believe the industry has occasionally overpromised is liquidity. Tokenisation does not magically make an illiquid asset liquid.
Liquidity comes from investor participation, market makers, regulatory certainty, trusted custody, credible pricing mechanisms, and active secondary markets. Blockchain can improve the mechanics of trading, but it cannot manufacture demand.
Fortunately, the conversation has matured considerably. Five years ago, tokenisation was often marketed as a shortcut to instant liquidity. Today, the industry is much more focused on building durable institutional market infrastructure.
How important is the surrounding ecosystem — including custody, settlement, identity, compliance, and governance — to bringing assets onchain, and how do those areas need to evolve alongside the assets themselves?
They're absolutely essential. In fact, I often say that the token itself is probably the smallest component of institutional tokenisation.
The real infrastructure consists of identity, custody, treasury management, regulated transfer agents, governance frameworks, compliance automation, banking relationships, and legal enforceability.
Without those components, you're not creating capital markets; you are simply issuing digital collectibles.
That's one reason we partnered with Anchorage Digital. Their custody and treasury infrastructure allows digital assets to operate within the same institutional risk frameworks expected by banks, public companies, and regulated investment managers.
Similarly, our use of Securitize's DS Protocol means transfer restrictions, shareholder records, and corporate actions are handled through an established institutional framework rather than custom-built smart contracts.
I also believe stablecoins will play an increasingly important role.
One of the biggest inefficiencies in today's financial system is that securities and cash often move across entirely separate infrastructures.
At Linework, we're building USDL as the settlement bridge for this new digital economy. Rather than viewing stablecoins purely as payment instruments, we see them as programmable settlement assets that connect tokenized securities, digital commerce, and institutional treasury operations.
The long-term vision is an ecosystem where tokenised assets such as LNWK represent ownership, while USDL provides the trusted medium for settlement, liquidity, and everyday transactions, all within a regulated framework. That creates a much more seamless financial architecture than today's fragmented systems.
Looking ahead 5–10 years, do you believe tokenisation will fundamentally reshape capital markets, or will it ultimately become an incremental improvement to existing financial infrastructure? What leads you to that view?
I believe tokenisation will fundamentally reshape capital markets — but quietly. The biggest technological revolutions are often invisible to the end user.
Most people don't think about the TCP/IP protocol when they browse the internet, and I believe blockchain infrastructure will evolve similarly. Investors won't ask whether an asset is tokenised any more than they ask whether a stock certificate is stored in paper form today.
They'll simply expect assets to settle faster, ownership to update instantly, compliance to be automated, dividends to distribute programmatically, and governance to operate digitally.
In that sense, tokenisation won't replace traditional finance — it will modernise it.
That's also why our strategy has always been to bring blockchain into regulated financial markets rather than asking regulated markets to move into crypto.
Our decision to tokenise Linework's own common stock before offering tokenisation services was intentional. We wanted to demonstrate that the infrastructure is credible enough to support a Delaware corporation preparing for a public-market future, not just blockchain-native projects. Our planned Nasdaq listing is an extension of that philosophy, showing that tokenisation and traditional capital markets are complementary rather than competing systems.
I also think the future isn't just about tokenised securities. It's about creating a fully integrated digital financial ecosystem.
In our vision, regulated tokenised assets such as LNWK become the productive assets of the network, while stablecoins like USDL become the transactional layer that enables payments, settlement, treasury management, and commerce across the ecosystem. That creates a closed-loop digital economy where capital formation, investment, and payments operate on the same infrastructure instead of separate financial rails.
In 5–10 years from now, I don't think we'll be talking about tokenisation as a separate industry. We'll simply be talking about how capital markets work.
The underlying infrastructure will have changed, but the objective will remain the same: making markets more efficient, more transparent, more accessible and, above all, more trustworthy.
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