Tokenization will transform the financial industry faster than digital technology disrupted legacy media—such as print newspapers, physical music formats, and other analog mediums—according to Keith Grossman, president of crypto payments company MoonPay.

“While many feared digitization would destroy media, what it actually did was force its evolution,” Grossman said. He added that real-world asset (RWA) tokenization—the process of representing traditional assets onchain—will similarly compel traditional financial institutions to adapt.

“This is no longer hypothetical. BlackRock is offering tokenized funds. Franklin Templeton is running tokenized money market funds on public blockchains. Major global banks are piloting onchain settlement, tokenized deposits, and real-time asset movement,” he said.

The market capitalization of the RWA sector, excluding stablecoins, currently stands at nearly $19 billion. Financial incumbents such as Citi, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and others will continue to exist, Grossman noted, but in a different form—much like media companies that survived the shift to digital distribution in the late 1990s and early 2000s, despite the disruption of business models that had worked for decades.

Ultimately, Grossman said, the winners of the transition toward tokenized finance will be the companies that get ahead of the change, not those that try to resist what he described as an inevitable shift toward a global financial system powered by blockchain rails.

Tokenizing real-world assets offers several advantages, including 24/7 market access, global scalability of asset classes, lower transaction costs through disintermediation, and settlement times reduced from days to minutes.

In September, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a joint statement outlining efforts to create a regulatory framework that would enable 24/7 capital markets.