Business
March 3, 2026
A notable shift is underway. Over the past couple of months, institutional tokenization has moved from conference panels to live products, with BlackRock, NYSE, and Northern Trust each bringing traditional assets onto blockchain rails.
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Why Institutional Tokenization Is Reshaping Wall Street’s Market Structure
BlackRock is working with Archax to bring money market fund exposure onto Hedera. The structure allows investors to hold blockchain-based representations of traditional cash equivalents, with faster settlement than the usual fund plumbing allows.
According to rwa.xyz, nearly $11 billion in US Treasury debt is now tokenized on public blockchains. BlackRock’s USD Institutional Liquidity Fund accounts for roughly $2.2 billion of that total.
There is no formal BlackRock-Hedera partnership. Archax selects the distributed ledger infrastructure. Still, the move puts BlackRock’s tokenization efforts directly on a public network that markets itself on high throughput and low transaction costs.
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At the same time, the New York Stock Exchange is pushing into tokenized equities. Its proposal for a blockchain-based alternative trading system would support extended-hour trading and near-instant settlement while remaining under existing US market rules.
Custody and clearing would stay tied to the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation. These were revealed in the filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). TD Securities described the initiative as a structural update to market plumbing and not just a retail-focused crypto product.
Meanwhile, Northern Trust Asset Management has taken a different route. The firm launched a tokenized share class of its NIF Treasury Instruments Portfolio. This was distributed through BNY’s LiquidityDirect platform. Northern Trust manages about $1.4 trillion in assets as of the end of December, 2025.
Tokenized treasuries are one of the largest categories of on-chain real-world assets, and Wall Street blockchain initiatives are no longer just experiments. Institutions can be seen stepping up and taking charge.
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