The Foundations Are In: What Nasdaq, DTC and Moody’s Just Did for Tokenization

In 2021, a Fillet au beret by Pablo Picasso became the first artwork to have its ownership rights broadcast onto a public blockchain by a regulated bank. Ownership was divided into digital tokens, giving more than 60 investors legally recognised stakes in the asset, and over the investment cycle, it returned approximately 20%. The tokens were professionally custodied, fully tradeable within a regulated environment, and treated in every legal sense as securities.

At the time, the reaction was a mix of genuine interest and polite skepticism. Art on the blockchain was novel, but it was unclear whether it pointed to something broader. Could tokenization work for mainstream assets at scale within the world’s core market infrastructure? Three things happened in a single week in March 2026 that may help answer that question. If you hold digital assets, follow the RWA space, or simply want to understand where capital markets are heading, they are worth understanding properly.

מה השתנה?

השמיים SEC and CFTC issued further guidance clarifying how federal securities laws apply to crypto assets. Nasdaq received SEC approval to trade certain securities in tokenised form through the Depository Trust Company. And Moody’s published its stablecoin rating methodology, the first from a major credit ratings agency.

Each of these is notable individually. Together, they represent something the tokenization space has not previously had: the regulatory and institutional scaffolding that mainstream capital may increasingly rely on to move with confidence.

The DTC development is the one that deserves the most attention. The DTC is the central post-trade utility that clears and settles the vast majority of US securities. It provides custody and asset services for securities valued at over $100 trillion. In December 2025, it received a no-action letter from the SEC authorising it to tokenize select securities on approved blockchains. Eligible assets include Russell 1000 stocks, major index ETFs, and US Treasurys. Tokenised holdings carry the same investor rights as their traditional equivalents. The first tokenised trades on Nasdaq could follow as early as Q3 2026.

This is not a startup running a pilot. It is the core of American market infrastructure beginning to move onto digital rails.

מה זה אומר בפועל

The efficiency gains that institutions talk about translate into real differences for individual investors, even if the language used to describe them rarely makes that connection explicit.

Fractional ownership is the clearest one. Tokenization makes it possible to hold a meaningful stake in assets that would otherwise require far more capital than most portfolios can support. The Picasso project illustrated this directly. Without tokenization, exposure to a high-value artwork means either deploying enormous capital or accepting the opacity of a traditional fund structure where you cannot see what you own or when you can sell it. With tokenization, an investor holds a defined, legally recognised share of a specific asset, with transparent pricing and a clear exit path.

Liquidity follows from that. Traditional alternative assets tend to be hard to exit. Real estate, private credit, infrastructure and art all share the same characteristic: secondary markets are thin, settlement takes days, and timing an exit is difficult. Assets that trade on blockchain rails have the potential to settle in seconds rather than days, around the clock. That changes what it means to hold something that would previously have been considered illiquid.

Then there is access more broadly. The tokenised asset market reached nearly $20 billion by the end of 2025, roughly four times its size a year earlier, and the range of assets available in tokenised form has expanded well beyond crypto-native products. Tokenised money market funds, private credit, real estate and equities are now live products offered by regulated institutions. The question is no longer whether these instruments exist. It is how quickly the infrastructure to access and trade them matures.

Being Honest About the Limitations

Regulatory parity between tokenised and traditional securities evolving and increasingly clarified under the Exchange Act. That matters because it removes a category of legal uncertainty that has caused compliance teams at large institutions to hold back. When the legal status of an asset is ambiguous, the answer is almost always no. That ambiguity is now resolved for the assets covered by the DTC pilot.

What has not changed overnight is the operational picture. The pilot is deliberately narrow. Interoperability between different tokenisation platforms is still a genuine problem, because assets that cannot move freely between systems create new versions of the liquidity silos tokenization is supposed to dissolve. Legal enforceability across borders in default scenarios also still needs work.

These are real constraints. But they are problems of execution rather than problems of direction. The legal runway is becoming clearer. The major market infrastructure providers are building actively. The fact that Moody’s is now developing credit analysis frameworks for stablecoin instruments tells you that the professional assessment layer is being built out too.

Why the Regulatory Framework Is the Selling Point, Not the Obstacle

There is a version of the tokenization story that frames regulation as friction, something slowing down what would otherwise move faster. That has never matched what we see from investors who have actually participated in tokenised structures.

The Picasso tokenization initiative worked because every part of it sat within a regulated framework. The tokens were legally recognised securities. The artwork was professionally stored and insured. The investment cycle had a defined structure and a clear redemption process. Investors were not betting on novel technology. They were buying a security that used blockchain as its settlement layer, in the same way that an equity uses a central securities depository.

That model, blockchain as infrastructure inside a regulated envelope rather than as an alternative to one, is precisely what the DTC pilot, the Nasdaq initiative and the Moody’s methodology are building toward at scale. BlackRock, JPMorgan and BNY are not investing in tokenization to get around the financial system. They are investing because it offers a better-performing version of the infrastructure they already operate within. For retail investors, that convergence is significant. It is what makes the products that come out of this wave worth trusting.

לאן זה הולך

Several credible forecasts place the total value locked in tokenised real-world assets above $100 billion by the end of 2026. Whether that proves accurate depends on how quickly shared wallet and identity standards develop, how clearly cross-border legal frameworks are resolved, and how prepared traditional institutions actually are to use the infrastructure they are building.

The near-term opportunities that are already concrete include tokenised money market funds with daily on-chain liquidity, tokenised private credit with cleaner secondary markets than traditional fund structures allow, and eventually, as the DTC and Nasdaq infrastructure matures, the ability to hold tokenised listed equities directly in digital wallets with fewer intermediaries in the chain.

The Picasso tokenization initiative proved the concept. What happened in March 2026 showed that the concept is progressing towards scalablitiy, and that the institutions building it are the same ones that run the existing financial system. For investors who have been watching this space, that is the shift worth paying attention to.