The line between traditional finance (TradFi) and cryptocurrencies is blurring, and tokenization has consistently been a dominant narrative in the digital asset industry for several years.
Edwin Mata, CEO and founder of tokenization platform Brickken, projects that Wall Street will be fully powered by blockchain technology by 2030. Mata told CoinDesk that tech industry buzzwords like “Web3” are fading as major banks adopt the technology for standard financial plumbing, such as settlements and payments.
“The fusion between Wall Street and technology is going to dissipate,” Mata said in an interview. “We are not going to talk about blockchain anymore. It is merging with fintech.”
While institutional interest in tokenizing real-world assets is growing, fueled by major moves like BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, Mata warned that Europe is over-regulating to stay out of the race.
This push toward native blockchain infrastructure was highlighted by Bullish’s (BLSH) $4.2 billion acquisition of transfer agent Equiniti. The agreement targets record-keeping for corporate shareholders to ensure that shares are issued and recorded directly on-chain from the beginning, rather than using synthetic digital “wrappers.” Bullish is also the parent company of CoinDesk.
The next shift toward tokenization will not be driven by humans, but by software, Mata said. Brickken, a Barcelona, Spain-based tokenization platform that has served as an avenue to bring $500 million in real-world assets onto the chain, is currently integrating AI agents to automate asset onboarding and liquidity for its 200 clients. .
Mata predicts that traditional software dashboards will soon be replaced by simple chat messages, where AI agents take care of the backend work to find the best financial returns.
“Those who make the decisions will no longer be us. It will be the AI,” said Mata.
Mata also criticized the European Union’s MiCA regulatory framework, which he said protects traditional banks by imposing costly and time-consuming compliance rules on small startups.
“Smaller players cannot access the market, which creates a moat for larger players,” Mata said. “It can take you nine months [to get a license]and if you are a startup, nine months without monetizing, you are dead.”
Startups may choose to relocate to the UAE and Southeast Asia rather than address these significant barriers. Mata believes that the United States will continue to be the main driver of crypto innovation simply because it controls the world’s largest capital market, making the current regulatory disputes in Washington temporary noise.
Charles Guillemet, CTO of France-based Ledger, shared Mata’s criticism. He told CoinDesk that the EU regulatory framework has transformed Web3’s competitive landscape, unintentionally affecting cryptocurrency startups and instead greatly benefiting legacy financial institutions.
Read more: Abra’s Bill Barhydt says Wall Street’s next crypto bet is tokenization
