Markets are moving on-chain. We are building where they land.
What the people who run the market's plumbing expect by 2030, what changes first, and why we are building one marketplace for indices, options, futures and ETFs on a single ledger rather than waiting for it.
- $17 bnTokenized financial assets today, about three times their size a year earlier.Citi Institute
- $5.5 trnProjected by 2030 in the base case, within a range of $2.7 to $8.2 trillion.Citi Institute
- 5.1 millionS&P 500 index options traded a day in the second quarter of 2026, a record.Cboe
Wall Street is moving on-chain.
Tokenized financial assets, securities recorded as tokens on a shared ledger, stand at roughly $17 billion today, about three times their size a year earlier. Citi Institute projects $5.5 trillion by 2030 in its base case, $2.7 trillion in the bear case and $8.2 trillion in the bull case, led not by exotic assets but by U.S. equities and treasuries: the most liquid, most standardized markets there are.
Three things changed. The core market infrastructure is building tokenization into its own rails: DTCC has clearance for a tokenization service covering stocks, ETFs and treasuries, NYSE has announced a tokenized platform for near-instant, around-the-clock trading of listed equities and ETFs, and Nasdaq has approval to issue, trade and settle certain stocks and ETFs in tokenized form. Regulated on-chain money, stablecoins and tokenized deposits, now gives those assets something to settle against; Citi Institute projects stablecoins alone at $1.9 trillion by 2030. And the rules are getting clearer.
Citi Institute scenarios for 2030, by asset class. Their estimates, quoted with attribution, not ours. Source report.
Settlement is the first thing that changes.
Today a trade agreed in a millisecond settles a day or more later. Each side keeps its own record and the two are reconciled afterwards. On a shared ledger the asset and the cash move in one step, delivery against payment by design, and both sides hold the same record from the start. Citi Institute expects the revenue tied to reconciliation and processing to compress, and names traditional post-trade intermediaries as the most exposed participants.
- Atomic settlementAsset and cash move together, so there is no window in which one side has paid and the other has not.
- Nothing to reconcileOne record, held by both parties, is the whole confirmation.
- Capital freedBuffers held against settlement risk shrink when the risk is gone.
The retail wave: always on, fractional, simple.
Citi Institute expects digitally native investors to drive early adoption, and estimates that if one in ten U.S. retail investors used on-chain solutions by 2030 it would create about $2.6 trillion of demand for tokenized equities. Its warning is the useful part: access alone does not create engagement. Adoption follows simplicity, clear value and lower cost, and the technology should be invisible. That is the brief for our individuals platform.
- Our own indices and ETFsFour indices to start, low-cost ETFs on each, options on the indices and on the ETFs.
- From any amountFractional units, so the first dollar buys a share of the market.
- One app, one ledgerTrade, hold and settle in the same place, at any hour.
One ledger, so collateral can move.
Today options trade on one exchange, futures on another and funds through a third channel, each with its own account, collateral and clearing. Citi Institute finds the clearest early gains in collateral and liquidity management: real-time collateral mobilization, intraday funding priced by the minute, and asset-to-asset exchange without cash as the go-between. That only works when the instruments share a ledger. An index option, a future, a ETF share and a swap recorded the same way can be held in one account against one cash balance, and collateral is checked by code rather than chased by phone.
- Same kind of recordEvery instrument we issue is written the same way, on the same ledger.
- One cash balanceEvery product in one account, fully paid for or fully collateralized; nothing borrowed.
- Collateral as codePosted in full, checked with every mark, released in the same step as settlement.
Own the index. List the options on it.
Citi Institute is blunt that adoption will be driven by economics, not technology: pricing, yield and cost decide, and fee pools tied to intermediation will compress. An ETF pays a licence to whoever owns its index, and that fee sits inside the expense ratio. We build our own index family under written, published rules, so our ETFs carry no licence and their expense ratios can be kept very low, and we can list cash-settled options on the indices directly. Index options are the deepest options market there is: S&P 500 index options traded a record 5.1 million contracts a day in the second quarter of 2026, by Cboe’s count. They are our flagship product.
- Written rulesSelection, weighting and rebalancing are published, not discretionary.
- No licence inside the feeThe index is ours, so nothing is paid to use it.
- Fewer layers to payIssuance, trading and settlement on one platform, not four.
Priced as the market moves.
Programmability is the second half of the report’s argument: once terms are data, financial logic such as marks, collateral checks and settlement can run as code. Every mark we publish is computed from inputs that are on the ledger or published, with the same model for everyone, and each figure points back to what produced it.
- No end-of-day cycleMarks follow the inputs continuously.
- TraceableA holder can rebuild any number from the inputs shown.
- Collateral from the markWhat a position needs is read from its price, in full, not from a leverage model.
Contracts that run themselves.
Citi Institute describes the shift as functions moving from operational processes to code-based execution. Our contracts are the sharpest case of it: the record prices itself, checks its own collateral, and at expiry computes and pays what it owes. Confirmations, statements and audit trails are reads of the record, not documents to be produced and matched.
- For institutionsSpecialized and bespoke contracts negotiated draft by draft, and post-trade that runs from the record.
- For individualsStandardized contracts whose terms are fixed, readable, and the same for everyone.
Who captures the value.
The report’s central prediction is that value concentrates with institutions that control both the issuance of assets and the rails they settle on, which it calls structural orchestrators, and that firms controlling neither face the most pressure. Our position is deliberate: we issue our own indices, index options, futures, ETFs and contracts, and we settle them on our own ledger. The ambition is to become the primary marketplace for these products, with trading moving to us because it is faster and cheaper.
- IssuanceIndices, index options, futures, ETFs, standardized and bespoke derivatives, all originated by us.
- SettlementOne ledger under every one of them.
- The honest caveatScale and regulatory alignment decide whether the position holds. We are early.
The hybrid years.
The report is clear that this is evolution, not revolution: tokenized and legacy systems will run side by side, which adds complexity before it removes any. It also lists the risks plainly: settlement in private money, unclear ownership rights, disclosure gaps, fragmentation across platforms, and liquidity that tokenization cannot manufacture. We take those as design constraints: native issuance, so the token is the legal record; published terms; and connections to existing rails rather than a parallel world. Later, tokenized securities from regulated issuers will list beside our own products, on the same ledger.
Where we are.
We are pre-launch, in Toronto, and the platform is in development: the index methodology is being written, the individuals platform is being built on simulated prices, and the institutional tooling is in design. We are multi-asset, not crypto-only: index options, futures and ETFs are the core, and crypto will come later as one asset class among many, without leverage. There is no token and no stablecoin of our own; blockchain is the infrastructure, not the product. Any future product will be available only where, and to whom, applicable law permits.
Figures and framework cited from Citi Institute, Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain (Citi GPS, 2026). They are Citi Institute’s estimates and views, quoted for context; they are not projections by TradeBayes and not a promise about any product. The S&P 500 index options figure is Cboe’s reported quarterly average daily volume for the second quarter of 2026.