A Broadridge survey covered by CoinDesk finds that 84% of financial institutions now treat asset tokenization as a strategic priority — not an experiment on the side, but something baked into planning. The survey's other headline finding is what firms expect to build toward: not a full migration to tokenized assets, but a hybrid market where tokenized and traditional assets trade side by side.
This article explains what "tokenization" means in this institutional context, why a hybrid model rather than a full replacement is the expected outcome, and what that implies for market infrastructure.
What tokenization means here
In institutional finance, tokenization is the process of representing ownership of a traditional asset — a bond, a money-market fund share, a piece of real estate — as a digital token on a blockchain or blockchain-like ledger. The underlying asset doesn't change; what changes is how ownership is recorded, transferred, and settled.
This is different from crypto-native assets like Bitcoin, which have no traditional-asset counterpart. Tokenization is about moving existing financial instruments onto programmable, faster-settling rails — not creating new asset classes.
| Concept | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Native crypto asset | An asset that only exists on-chain | Bitcoin, Ether |
| Tokenized asset | A traditional asset represented as an on-chain token | Tokenized US Treasuries, money-market fund shares |
| Traditional asset | Held and settled through conventional custodian/clearing rails | Same Treasury bond, held in a brokerage account |
Why 84% is a notable number
Surveys about blockchain adoption in finance have circulated for years, and skepticism about "strategic priority" claims is reasonable — institutions say a lot of things are priorities. What makes this figure worth attention is the trajectory: tokenization has moved from a subject of pilots and working groups to something firms are now formally planning around at the strategy level, alongside comparable institutional moves like Securitize's public listing as a pure-play tokenization company and BlackRock and Ethena's institutional stablecoin rails.
A strategic priority designation typically means budget allocation, dedicated teams, and executive-level ownership — a different commitment level than "we're monitoring the space." The survey suggests that threshold has been crossed at most of the institutions polled.
Moving from pilot to strategic priority means the question inside these firms has shifted from "should we" to "how fast."
Why "hybrid," not "replacement"
The survey's framing — a hybrid market where tokenized and traditional assets coexist — is the more consequential finding than the adoption percentage itself. It signals that the institutions closest to this shift are not planning for tokenization to replace existing market infrastructure wholesale. They're planning for coexistence.
There are practical reasons a full replacement isn't the expected path:
- Legacy settlement systems carry decades of regulatory, legal, and operational infrastructure that isn't trivial to retire, even if a token-based alternative is technically superior.
- Liquidity is currently concentrated in traditional rails. A tokenized version of an asset is only as useful as the market willing to trade it; deep liquidity migrates slowly.
- Regulatory frameworks for tokenized securities are still maturing in most jurisdictions, making a full migration a multi-year regulatory project even where the technology is ready today.
The realistic near-term outcome is a market where some assets and some workflows move to tokenized rails first — repo, money-market funds, and other high-turnover instruments are the common early candidates — while others stay on traditional infrastructure until the economics or regulation shift decisively.
What this means for builders
If you're building infrastructure in this space, design for interoperability between tokenized and traditional rails, not for a world where tokenized assets have fully displaced conventional custody and settlement. The survey's own framing — hybrid, not wholesale replacement — suggests the winning products over the next few years will be the ones that let institutions move specific asset classes onto tokenized rails incrementally, with clean bridges back to traditional systems, rather than products that assume an all-or-nothing migration.
Conclusion
Tokenization crossing the 84% strategic-priority threshold among financial institutions is a meaningful adoption signal, but the more actionable detail is what these firms expect the market to look like once they've acted on that priority: hybrid, not fully tokenized. Market infrastructure, custody products, and settlement tooling built for that coexistence — rather than for a clean-break future — are better matched to where institutional demand is actually heading.