Wall Street is going on-chain. You can see it in the numbers. The total value of tokenized assets on public blockchains passed $31 billion in July 2026. This is up more than 400% from the start of 2025. Private credit has become the largest segment. BlackRock (BLK), Franklin Templeton (BEN), Apollo (APO), and KKR (KKR) all have live tokenized products. Standard Chartered (STAN) projected that the market would hit $30 trillion by 2034.
Now, it would be crazy to say all this without highlighting the discrepancies. Regulation is tightening, compliance costs are rising, and the firms that cut corners early are now paying for it.
In a new interview, Edwin Mata, CEO and co-founder of Brickken, spoke about what is really happening in this market, what Europe's new crypto rules have done to the industry, and why the US is now the next big target for serious tokenization firms.
The Industry Is Growing Up
Mata told me the early days of tokenization, which involved testing ideas, building technology, and educating the market, are behind us. The industry is now in a new phase. The focus has started to shift to making tokenized products safe enough and compliant enough to work for everyday investors and large institutions alike.
That shift is separating winners from losers. The firms that built carefully and compliantly from the start are pulling ahead. The ones that moved fast and skipped the hard compliance work are struggling to catch up.
The most visible sign of that shakeout is happening in Europe right now. Europe's new crypto regulation, MiCA, hit its hard deadline on July 1st with no grace period. Of the more than 1,200 firms that previously held national crypto licences across the EU, fewer than 18% had secured full authorisation by May. Most of the rest are now either out of the market or in limbo.
When I raised this with Mata, he was candid. Getting a MiCA licence is expensive, slow, and legally complex. The process can take nine to twelve months. For a startup without steady revenue, that timeline can be fatal. The firms that get through it come out holding real credibility with institutional clients.
But Mata also pointed to a contradiction: the regulation meant to protect investors is also shielding the big legacy banks from competition. Even Binance, with all its resources, failed to secure a European licence despite 18 months of trying.
Brickken is still working through its own application. "It's a heavy lift," Mata said. "You need deep pockets, the right team, and the patience to navigate a timeline that most startups can't afford."
Why the US Is Next
Brickken is planning to enter the US market within three to five years, but Mata made clear the preparation is already underway. The firm has started targeting US clients and is thinking about opening a physical office there.
A lot of that depends on the CLARITY Act. The bill passed the House with 294 votes, the strongest show of congressional support for crypto legislation ever. It is now before the Senate, with August seen as the last realistic window for it to pass this year.
Tokenizing securities is already legal in the US, Mata noted. But the CLARITY Act would send a clear signal to banks and asset managers that the environment is stable enough to move seriously. "If it passes," he told me, "demand will amplify, and that accelerates everything for us."
What Institutions Are Really Paying For
One of the most interesting parts of our conversation was what Mata said institutions are actually buying, and it is not what most people assume.
A few years ago, the pitch was simply about getting assets onto a blockchain. That conversation has moved on. Institutions now want full lifecycle management: the ability to manage a tokenized asset compliantly from the moment it is created, through trading, distributions, corporate actions, all the way to redemption.
The reason is simple. Large financial firms have reputations built over decades. If something goes wrong with a tokenized product they are associated with, it reflects on them. Most would rather hand that responsibility to a trusted partner than build it in-house.
I asked Mata how a firm operating across 30 countries with different laws actually keeps on top of compliance. His answer was practical. It is impossible to know every regulation in every market.
What Brickken relies on is the fact that financial regulation around the world is slowly converging. Countries are increasingly borrowing from each other's frameworks. Being MiCA-compliant in Europe makes it easier to adjust to similar rules elsewhere, because the core principles- investor protection, transparency, operational resilience are becoming more universal.
Where the Money Is
When I asked where the biggest near-term opportunity sits, Mata pointed to private credit and debt. Debt is the backbone of the global financial system, and private credit is already the largest single tokenized asset class on-chain, around $8 billion in active loans.
Looking further ahead, he said fund tokenization would be the thing that surprises people most over the next two to five years. On-chain fund structures that can raise capital, pay out returns, and execute trades automatically, without the manual processes that make traditional fund management so costly, are already showing real demand.
Mata believes AI agents will eventually handle much of the complex financial decision-making that currently requires specialist knowledge. That could open up investment products to a much wider pool of people. But he was firm about one thing: the human behind the instruction is always responsible, regardless of whether an AI carried it out.
Brickken built what it calls Regulated AI Mandates, guardrails that keep human accountability intact even when AI is doing the work. "Liability stays with the human who created the execution order," he said. "That chain cannot break."
The conversation ended with the CEO stating that the point at which any company, anywhere in the world, can tokenize an asset through Brickken's platform without needing a lawyer, a consultant, or a technical expert to guide them through it. The product just works.
He compared it to ChatGPT: this was a tool that started out complicated and then became, very quickly, something millions of people use without thinking twice about how it works.
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