Real-world asset tokenization is still treated by many investors as a slow financial market shift. The evidence is starting to move faster than that assumption.

J.P. Morgan says Kinexys has processed more than $3 trillion in transactions since inception and now averages more than $5 billion a day. US banking regulators also clarified in March 2026 that eligible tokenized securities should generally receive the same capital treatment as their non-tokenized form.

The investor question is no longer whether tokenized finance can work in theory. It is whether markets are still valuing it like a 2030 theme while regulated institutions are already building the pipes.

The 2030 Timeline Looks Too Slow

McKinsey estimates that tokenized market capitalization could reach around $2 trillion by 2030, excluding cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, with a bullish scenario of around $4 trillion.

That forecast still matters. What matters more is the shift in language from major institutions. The IMF's April 2026 note describes tokenization as a structural shift in financial architecture, with implications for settlement, liquidity, risk management and governance.

The market has spent years asking whether real-world asset tokenization will happen. The better question now is whether it is being priced too slowly.

Infrastructure, Not Hype, Is The Real Test

The World Economic Forum's 2025 report frames tokenization around shared records, programmability, fractional ownership and composability. It also warns that legacy infrastructure, regulatory fragmentation, limited interoperability and liquidity issues remain real barriers.

That is where the investment case becomes more interesting. Tokenization does not need to transform every asset class at once to matter. If it changes collateral, money-market funds, treasury workflows, repo, digital securities and bank settlement first, the market impact could arrive well before full adoption.

Read More: Ztudium Founder Dinis Guarda On Stablecoins And The Governance Gap

Exclusive Interview with Ztudium Founder Dinis Guarda

In this exclusive interview with Champions Speakers Agency, Ztudium founder Dinis Guarda argues that markets are mispricing real-world asset tokenization because the evidence points to a 12-to-24-month window, not a decade-long shift.

He also explains why digital identity may be undervalued, where regulation could still break the thesis, and how tokenized, auditable, AI-readable financial records could define the next financial cycle.

Q: Which digital finance trend do you think markets are currently mispricing: stablecoins, tokenisation, AI fraud detection, digital identity, embedded finance or bank-led crypto services, and what evidence would prove that view right or wrong?

Dinis Guarda: "The most significantly mispriced trend, in my view, is the tokenization of real-world assets integrating AI Agents powered digital assets, not because it is undervalued in absolute terms, but because the market is pricing it as a long-cycle, decade-long transformation when the evidence suggests the inflection is happening now, in this 12-to-24-month window.

"The IMF’s April 2026 note on tokenised finance, authored by Tobias Adrian, Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department, does not describe tokenisation as an emerging trend. It describes it as a fundamental reconfiguration of how trust, settlement, and risk management are organised across the global financial system.

"That is language from one of the world’s most conservative financial institutions, and it deserves to be taken at face value, but needs integration with a world that goes full digital and managed by real-time AI agents. McKinsey forecasts $4–5 trillion in digital securities issuance by 2030.

"The WEF estimates $15–20 billion in annual operational savings and over $100 billion in annual capital freed through more efficient collateral management. These are not speculative projections. They are being validated in real production systems right now.

"The evidence that would prove this view right is already accumulating: OCBC Bank moved tokenized corporate bonds into full production for treasury management in January 2025; the Federal Reserve, OCC, and FDIC issued joint guidance in March 2026 confirming technology-neutral capital treatment for tokenized securities, removing the single largest regulatory ambiguity that had held institutional allocators back; and the SEC-CFTC joint interpretation of March 2026 named sixteen crypto assets as digital commodities, accelerating the classification clarity that the entire institutional market needed.

"The evidence that would prove the view wrong, that tokenization is complex and being overpriced in the near term, would be a CLARITY Act failure in the Senate, combined with continued fragmentation between US, EU, and Asian regulatory frameworks creating inoperable cross-border settlement.

"If interoperability standards do not converge, the promise of a single programmable global capital market remains fractured into regional silos, and the $4–5 trillion McKinsey projection becomes a 2035 story rather than a 2028 one.

"I would add that digital identity is systematically undervalued because it is the invisible infrastructure that every other digital finance trend depends upon.

"You cannot have compliant stablecoin payments without identity verification. You cannot have tokenised real estate without KYC-embedded ownership records. And you cannot have bank-led crypto custody without identity-anchored compliance.

"Finally, on AGI, Augmented General Intelligence, markets are systematically underestimating the speed at which agentic AI systems will begin to operate autonomously within financial infrastructure.

"The transition from AI-as-tool to AI-as-agent within trading, risk management, and capital allocation is not a 2030 story. It is now.

"The firms that will define the financial economy of the next decade are those building the data infrastructure, tokenised, auditable, AI-readable, today.

"As I articulate in my central thesis across all my work: each human being is humanity. In the financial context, that translates to a system where each individual, each transaction, each asset, carries its full informational identity through the economic ecosystem: transparent, verifiable, and alive."

Disclosure: Champions Speakers Agency represents Dinis Guarda only for speaking engagements. The views expressed in this interview are for informational purposes only and should not be treated as financial, investment or legal advice.

Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.