Regulation is why the mood changed from last year. The $GENIUS Act gave payment stablecoins legitimacy, and speakers repeatedly pointed to the CLARITY Act, still working through the Senate, as the bigger unlock. RedStone co-founder Marcin Kazmierczak framed it bluntly: CLARITY could be a 10x or even 100x moment relative to $GENIUS, because it opens the door to the full range of asset classes.
Where’s the traction? Cash and collateral are the beachheads
Collateral is where tokenization earns its keep first. On the repo panel, Broadridge’s Robert Krugman said his firm now moves around $370 billion of tokenized repo a day on the Canton network. That is a sliver of the $12 trillion US repo market, but a real one, and the programmability pitch is simple.
“If you want to borrow for five minutes, you pay for five minutes [instead of a full day]. It’s a no-brainer,” said Ami Ben-David, CEO at Ownera.
Asset managers echoed utility over novelty. A recurring principle was that if you tokenize a product, it has to be a net better product than the one it replaces. Apollo’s Christine Moy said the firm’s tokenized private credit fund has confirmed what she calls the “superpowers” of onchain assets: secondary liquidity for otherwise illiquid products, and the ability to post private credit as collateral in DeFi protocols like Aave and Morpho.
