In this opinion piece Aaron Gwak highlights that many institutions have inappropriate go-to-market strategies for tokenization. Gwak is the founder and CEO of Libeara, a tokenization startup incubated by Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures
If you walked into a coffee house in London or Amsterdam three hundred years ago looking to raise capital, the process was strikingly direct and personal. You looked an investor in the eye, handed them a handwritten claim, and took their gold or silver. That paper was essentially a bearer asset — circulating claims on value that could be handed from person to person without a bank intermediary. This is the closest historical analog to a stablecoin or tokenized asset: a digital bearer instrument that represents value but lives outside a bank account. It was efficient, direct, and arguably the purest form of capitalism – simple, but fragile at scale.
As markets scaled, directness became dangerous. This danger wasn’t theoretical; it was a systemic collapse of physical logistics. “Runners” carrying sacks of negotiable securities were mugged on Wall Street, back offices lost track of billions in unsettled trades, and the NYSE was eventually forced to close on Wednesdays just to clear the backlog.
Over the last century, and further refined, following the scars of 1929, 1997, and 2008, we built necessary fortifications. We layered the system with custodians, central securities depositories, and transfer agents. We solved the crisis by distancing the investor from the asset; for the last fifty years, you haven’t owned your stock directly — you’ve owned a claim on a bank, that holds a claim on a depository, that holds the truth.
Today, the buzzword “tokenization” is often sold as a futuristic revolution. It is not. Tokenization is architectural archaeology. It is a return to the direct ownership and transferability of those early coffee houses, but updated with the regulatory safeguards of the last hundred years.
When we strip away the technical jargon, what we are really seeing is a return of the rational actor who wants their claim in their hand (or wallet), not buried three layers deep in a custodian’s ledger.
Traditional bankers will tell you that tokenized Treasuries are built for pension funds or asset managers looking for “modernisation” or “operational efficiency”. This is a solution in search of a problem that money managers simply do not have.
Our data tells a completely different story. Of the $1 billion in regulated assets tokenized by Libeara’s technology, over 80% was sold to Web3 natives. This reveals a fundamental disconnect in the industry’s narrative: We are selling efficiency to a market that is buying sovereignty.
These buyers are not looking for a “TradFi experience” on the blockchain. They are crypto-native liquidity pools that have no interest in off-ramping to a bank. They are looking to import the risk-free rate into their own ecosystem, demanding the same direct ownership and transferability that defined capital markets two centuries ago. This statistic is the smoking gun that should be informing every institutional strategy.
Skeptics often ask if “operational alpha” — specifically T+0 (instant) settlement — is overrated. After all, if the dominant behavior is “buy and hold,” does it matter if the trade settles instantly or in two days?
In the old world, T+2 was an annoyance. In the Web3 economy, T+0 is table stakes.
For the digital native, an asset is both a store of value and strictly functional collateral. The market looks like it is just holding assets today only because the infrastructure is nascent. As financial assets become fully composable, speed and atomicity become essential. T+0 is not a luxury feature designed for showing off; it is the minimum requirement for a return to bearer assets that can be handed over instantly to satisfy a margin call or secure a loan.
Perhaps the greatest miscalculation by institutional giants is their go-to-market strategy. Banks are currently building bridges to drag traditional investors onto the blockchain. This too is trying to sell a solution to a problem that does not exist..
ETFs already solve crypto access for traditional portfolios. The real flow — the flow that matters — is on-chain capital seeking off-chain yield. Tokenization is not an outreach programme for TradFi clients; it is a distribution rail for on-chain liquidity. The strategy must invert. We shouldn’t be trying to convince a pension fund to manage a private key; we should be bringing regulated products to where the billions of dollars on-chain are already sitting, idle and hungry for yield. Ironically, it is only once millions of individuals hold regulated assets on-chain that those same pension funds, wanting to trade directly with them, will finally learn how to operate a private key.
Is the flood of Web3 capital into stable, unexciting T-bills a sign that the “crypto dream” is over?
Quite the opposite. It is its validation.
It is bearish for speculative tokens, certainly. But it is profoundly bullish for blockchain as financial infrastructure. When users swap volatile tokens for tokenized Treasury funds, they are choosing to keep their wealth on the new rails of blockchain, rejecting the friction of the traditional banking system even when buying the most traditional asset on earth.
We are building infrastructure that removes the gatekeepers entirely.
We are returning to the directness of the handwritten claim, powered by modern technology and shaped by the regulatory lessons of the last century.
It is not a break from financial history. It is its next iteration.
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