From Product Innovation to Shared Infrastructure
Anna Liu, CEO of HashKey RWA, argues that the next stage of tokenized finance will not be defined by launching more single-asset products, but by lowering the cost of connecting institutions so the same tokenized asset can circulate across different financial firms and business scenarios. The core thesis: scale depends on reducing cross-institutional connection and collaboration costs, enabling network effects that turn tokenization from isolated product innovation into shared financial infrastructure.
Why Connection Cost Is the Real Bottleneck
The first wave of real-world asset tokenization focused on proof-of-concept: tokenized treasuries, private credit, and funds issued on-chain to demonstrate feasibility. But a tokenized asset that lives inside a single issuer’s walled garden delivers limited utility. Its value multiplies only when custody, settlement, collateral, and secondary trading can happen across multiple institutions without bespoke integrations each time.
- Interoperability standards determine whether a tokenized bond issued by one bank can be pledged as collateral at another.
- Shared identity and compliance rails reduce the per-counterparty onboarding cost that currently fragments liquidity.
- Common settlement infrastructure lets the same asset serve multiple use cases rather than being locked to one platform.
Network Effects as the Scaling Engine
Liu’s framing mirrors classic platform economics: as connection costs fall, more institutions and assets join, and each new participant increases the utility of the network for everyone else. This is the transition from a collection of tokenization pilots to an interoperable market where assets are continuously reused — as collateral in repo, as collateral in lending, as a settlement leg in cross-border payments.
Implications for TradFi-DeFi Convergence
For banks, asset managers, and DeFi protocols alike, the strategic question shifts from “can we tokenize this asset?” to “can this asset move freely between venues?” Institutions that build on open standards and interoperable settlement layers stand to capture the network effect; those that build closed systems risk stranded liquidity.
Forward Look
The coming phase will likely be judged less by the number of tokenized products and more by how many institutions can transact the same asset without custom plumbing. If connection costs keep falling, tokenized finance could evolve into genuinely shared infrastructure — the precondition for the scale the industry has long promised.
