<div id="readability-page-1" class="page"><div><div><p>Author: Prathik Desai; Translation: BitpushNews</p><p>Looking back to 2015, European banks had been digitizing their operations for nearly two decades. You could check your balance, transfer funds, and pay bills via your mobile phone. Despite the well-functioning infrastructure, every financial service still had to go through the bank as a &#34;gatekeeper.&#34; No other service could access your funds without the bank's permission.</p><p>Subsequently, PSD2 (Payments Service Directive 2) forced banks to open up their underlying infrastructure via APIs. Stripe built its European treasury business on open banking, Plaid connected hundreds of millions of accounts, and Shopify began using transaction data to underwrite loans. Embedded finance revenue in Europe alone is projected to exceed €100 billion annually by 2030.</p><p>... However, for the industry to achieve this goal, it must first go through a 15-year period of adjustment for online banking, a period during which hundreds of millions of people will understand that digital financial infrastructure is reliable. The API layer doesn't create trust out of thin air; it's built on years of accumulated trust. This is the story of trust evolving around any new technology. Tokenization is currently experiencing the same moment. Last week, Pantera Capital released a report on the state of tokenization in 2026. In this report, they scored 542 out of 593 live tokenized assets based on three dimensions of on-chain maturity—issuance and redemption, transferability and settlement, and composability—resulting in an average Tokenization Progress Index (TPI) of 2.04 (out of 5). Approximately 77% of the tokenized assets remain “digital receipts” of their original offline assets. In these cases, the offline ledger remains authoritative; the token simply adds a data layer on top. It’s easy to interpret these scores as “poor performance.” Crypto novices might call it industry stagnation. But no technology can achieve sustained large-scale adoption by skipping the “trust-building phase.” The reasons are as follows: Pantera's report found that of the 593 assets tracked, 460 (77%) fell into the category of &#34;Wrappers,&#34; while only 16 were natively launched, managed, and recorded on-chain. Tokenized wrappers refer to assets whose minting and redemption are still conducted off-chain by centralized issuers. Approximately 66 belong to the hybrid category. Pantera refers to the current stage as the &#34;newspaper stage on the website.&#34; This phase wasn't a failure of the industry to mature quickly, but rather the first step in testing whether the on-chain representation of existing traditional assets could offer any benefit. Let's look back twenty years. Imagine reading about e-commerce for the first time. You scrolled through the page, clicked &#34;buy,&#34; and a stranger sent you a box. Back then, the idea felt incredible. You might have placed an order just to experience it. But would you have been willing to pay before the box arrived? The early days of e-commerce relied heavily on cash on delivery because customers were slowly accepting the idea of ​​&#34;buying something before touching and feeling the physical object.&#34; Users preferred cash on delivery because it helped them overcome the first hurdle: believing that e-commerce was a viable model. The technology facilitating online transactions wasn't the problem—interbank transfers powered by SWIFT had existed since the early 1970s, and consumer payments through platforms like CyberCash and PayPal became possible in the 1990s and early 2000s. However, the shift to online payments came much later. Similarly, the first wave of tokenization is paving the way for subsequent developments: programmable compliance, autonomous collateral management, and real-time yield optimization. This is followed by financial architecture modules that decouple and recombine ownership, cash flow, and risk. Tokenized versions of offline assets demonstrate that new technologies can enable faster settlement, cheaper transfers, and clearer ledgers. Whenever a tokenized government bond or money market fund settles faster than its offline equivalent, it builds confidence among customers. Data in the report also supports this view. Of Pantera's three TPI criteria, the dimension measuring transferability and settlement scored the highest at 2.29. In fact, 205 assets scored 3 on this dimension, indicating that the industry is increasingly adopting blockchain as an authoritative governance and settlement layer. In contrast, the TPI for issuance and redemption layers lagged behind, at only 1.82. Over 91% of assets still rely on administrator-gated minting and custodian-mediated exits. These scores suggest that the market is more accustomed to reliably moving assets on-chain before trusting that blockchains can autonomously initiate and redeem assets. This maturity curve is inevitable for any technology. That's because even the greatest technology cannot create demand for an asset out of thin air. Demand is for the asset, not the track. Introducing native on-chain assets does not automatically attract funds. The report's data reinforces this point. Stablecoins account for 91.6% of the $320 billion tokenized market. US Treasury bonds contribute another $12 billion. Together, they account for approximately 95% of the total. All other assets, including private equity, real estate, and corporate bonds, represent a negligible 5% today. This shows that the market isn't blindly chasing the most interesting &#34;native tokenized assets.&#34; Demand follows the assets people have always wanted to invest in. People don't care whether something comes in the form of a wrapper or a native on-chain Treasury fund. As long as new infrastructure provides them with a progressively better experience in holding, transferring, and recording assets, they are more likely to choose it over old infrastructure. We see this dynamic in many primitives across the crypto ecosystem. Hyperliquid's HIP-3, launched in late 2025, enables permissionless perpetual futures markets for real-world assets, including stocks, commodities, indices, and forex. Since its launch, these markets have seen trading volumes exceeding $240 billion. In January 2026, Hyperliquid's silver HIP-3 perpetual contract market accounted for 2% of the metal's global trading volume within just one month of its launch. This demand is not due to Hyperliquid inventing a new format. Traders who choose Hyperliquid are already looking for exposure to Tesla, silver, gold, and the S&amp;P 500. The format Hyperliquid offers—a 24/7, permissionless, non-custodial venue—simply minimizes the friction and time between events and traders expressing their opinions. These underlying assets were already popular outside of Hyperliquid. The technology's success stems from the platform's amplified accessibility. The same dynamic is playing out in the tokenization space. Private lending accounts for the highest share of its supply among actively deployed DeFi protocols at 64%. This is significantly higher than stablecoins' 9% and Treasury bonds' 3.2%. The demand isn't specifically for &#34;tokenized&#34; private lending. People deploying their funds into DeFi protocols through tokenized private lending do so because these wrappers offer them stablecoin-denominated yields. The underlying demand remains a thirst for non-crypto yields. They don't care whether the underlying tracks are merely wrappers around existing private lending products or native on-chain products. Even the surge in commodities confirms this. Native on-chain products surrounding tokenized commodities systems have grown fivefold from $1 billion in January 2025 to $5 billion today. This isn't because these tracks offer something different. This leap mirrors gold's 65% gain in 2025—its strongest annual gain since 1979. The appreciation of tokenized gold products is largely due to the appreciation of gold itself. Blockchain merely facilitates better settlement, transfer, and ownership management of assets. If the underlying asset is attractive, tokenization can make it more accessible, cheaper to settle, and easier to move. If the underlying asset itself is lackluster, no amount of on-chain composability can compensate. Where is the industry headed? The Pre-API Era: I find a striking resemblance between the PSD2 moment and the tokenization process. Regulatory breakthroughs in Europe, passed in 2015 and taking effect in 2018, spurred the development of large-scale native products like Stripe Financial Connections and embedded lending between 2020 and 2023. It took approximately five to eight years for the underlying open infrastructure to nurture mature native products. The regulatory breakthrough for tokenization began to take shape in 2024 and gradually materialized across various jurisdictions. The MiCA (Crypto Asset Market Regulation) came into full effect in December 2024, and by the end of 2025, 102 crypto asset service providers across Europe had been authorized. The GENIUS Act was signed into law in July 2025, becoming the first federal legislation in the United States specifically targeting digital assets. A few weeks later, the SEC launched Project Crypto, and Chairman Atkins acknowledged that companies from Wall Street to Silicon Valley were lining up for tokenization. If the timeline for embedded finance holds true, we should expect native on-chain products to emerge within the next 3-4 years. They may not be ubiquitous, nor will they cover all asset classes. However, we will see transformation sooner in niche areas where sufficient trust has been established at the wrapper stage and the underlying demand already exists. Private lending is the clearest candidate. Of every three dollars of on-chain private lending, two dollars are already active in DeFi. The composability of private lending products like Maple's syrupUSDC, which are thriving in DeFi, is built on infrastructure that has first proven its reliability in underwriting, issuing, and recovering loans on-chain. Native functionality will arrive as an extension of that earned trust. The $320 billion tokenized market scores only 2.04 out of 5. That still reads like a failing grade. But this is the starting point for a new industry to build trust, positioning itself with faster settlement, cheaper accounting, and a more transparent ledger until the market demand for native on-chain assets truly explodes.</p></div></div></div>

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<p>A recent report by Pantera Capital reveals that 77% of tokenized assets are still in the 'shell' stage, functioning as digital receipts rather than fully on-chain assets. The Tokenization Progress Index (TPI) averaged 2.04 out of 5, indicating a slow maturation process. While the industry is adopting blockchain for transferability and settlement, reliance on centralized issuers for minting and redemption remains high. This phase is crucial for building trust in tokenization, similar to the early days of e-commerce.</p>

- The article discusses the evolution of digital finance, emphasizing the transition driven by PSD2, which facilitated open banking and allowed third-party access to banking infrastructure.  
- It highlights that the tokenization landscape is currently in a formative phase, with many assets still reliant on traditional systems, yet the building of trust is essential for future adoption.  
- The author suggests that, similar to the path of embedded finance, the development of native on-chain products will see progress in the next few years, particularly as regulatory frameworks mature and existing demands are met.

The truth about tokenization: 77% are still in the "shell" stage.