Particle.news

Tokenization Outpaces Wall Street’s Back‑Office Readiness

Industry leaders say fixing banks’ books‑and‑records, compliance tools, vendor software is required for tokenized assets to handle U.S. market volumes.

Overview

  • Ophelia Snyder, former 21Shares co‑founder, said on June 22–23 that blockchains now handle transaction speed but that the bigger problem is plugging tokenized assets into existing post‑trade operations.
  • Banks, brokerages and asset managers must reconcile tokenized, often bearer, instruments with books‑and‑records systems that were built for traditional book‑entry securities.
  • Many third‑party vendor platforms for compliance, reporting and risk controls have not been adapted to support blockchain‑native transactions, creating integration bottlenecks.
  • Firms face two paths: build new blockchain‑native software designed to include institutional controls or require incumbent vendors to retrofit their products, and both options could take years during ongoing cloud migrations.
  • The next decisive tests will come as pilots move toward production and tokenized systems are placed in the critical operational path of major firms, a step that will reveal whether current approaches can scale to U.S. capital‑market volumes.