The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has been around long enough to have seen every version of modern finance.
It was started all the way back in 1792, when a handful of brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement under a tree on Wall Street. That agreement formalized how securities would be traded and priced, turning informal deal-making into an organized market.
For more than a century, trading on the NYSE was done with paper certificates, hand signals and the physical presence of traders on a crowded floor.
Image: Library of Congress
Orders were written down, walked across the room and reconciled by hand. It was a slow and messy process.
Then technology began to speed up the market.
Telephones sped up communication, and computers eventually replaced paper. In the 1970s and 1980s, electronic order routing began to change how trades were matched. And in the late 1990s, the internet and electronic trading systems turned the NYSE from a physical marketplace into a digital one.
Over the past quarter-century, changes like decimal pricing and electronic settlement steadily lowered trading costs and increased speed, which helped drive a massive rise in trading volume.
Naturally, every one of these changes was considered radical at the time they were implemented. But they eventually became an invisible part of how the stock market works.
Now, the NYSE is talking about making another “radical” change.
And it’s further proof of my thesis that tokenization is inevitable.
What the NYSE Is Building Now
Last week, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the company that owns and operates the New York Stock Exchange, confirmed plans for a new digital platform that will allow stocks and ETFs to trade in tokenized form.
These tokenized shares will trade alongside traditional shares and be treated the same way, even though they’re issued and settled using digital infrastructure.
That’s important because they’re fungible with traditional shares, meaning a tokenized share and a regular share can be traded for one another without friction. There’s no split market and no second version of the same stock.
This new platform will simply be an extension of the core exchange.
ICE also made clear that it’s part of a broader digital strategy that includes preparing its clearing infrastructure for 24/7 trading and enabling the use of tokenized collateral.
To put the scale of this change in perspective, the NYSE lists companies with a combined market value of roughly $45 trillion.
On a typical day last year, over 17.5 billion shares traded on the exchange. That equates to roughly $824 billion in dollar value changing hands daily.
When an institution that moves that much capital every single day starts redesigning its infrastructure to allow for constant, instant trading, it tells me that investor expectations have changed.
After all, Wall Street didn’t invent 24/7 trading.
Crypto did.
Crypto markets showed the ability for assets to be traded around the clock and settle quickly on shared digital ledgers. Early efforts might have been chaotic and poorly regulated, but they proved that investors value speed and access.
And once that genie was out of the bottle, traditional markets couldn’t ignore it.
The response from the biggest players in finance has been to extract the parts of crypto that work and integrate them into regulated, institutional systems.
That’s exactly what ICE is doing here.
When I wrote that tokenization is inevitable, I made the argument that markets evolve toward structures that move capital faster, reduce friction and lower risk.
Tokenization does all three.
Today’s equity markets still rely on settlement systems that were designed decades ago. A T+2 settlement cycle means that a trade doesn’t fully settle until two business days after it’s made.
That keeps capital tied up, and because of the delay, the system also needs extra layers of checks and safeguards just to manage the risk.
Tokenized settlement changes the equation.
Since ownership updates in real time on a shared ledger, the need for delay-based risk management shrinks. Capital becomes more efficient and liquidity improves.
And it doesn’t require new asset classes or new investor behavior. In other words, it’s a back-end upgrade with front-end consequences.
That’s why ICE is preparing its clearing infrastructure and exploring tokenized collateral. And it’s working on this alongside firms like BNY Mellon and Citigroup, companies that sit at the heart of global finance.
These powerful companies wouldn’t commit resources unless the direction was clear.
Tokenization is inevitable.
Here’s My Take
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has said tokenization represents the next major step for markets and that in the future essentially every stock and every bond could live on one general ledger.
This is the idea behind what the NYSE is now building.
The Boston Consulting Group suggests that as much as $16 trillion worth of assets could be tokenized by the end of this decade.
Source: https://www.token-city.com/
This includes equities, bonds, funds, real estate and collateral instruments. On a global scale, it would represent roughly 10% of world GDP.
McKinsey & Company, one of the most respected firms in traditional finance, is more conservative. It projects the total market capitalization of tokenized financial assets could reach around $2 trillion by 2030, with an optimistic scenario possibly doubling that number.
The range between BCG’s $16 trillion outlook and McKinsey’s $2 to $4 trillion scenario might seem wide. But both point to the inevitable conclusion that tokenized markets will be measured in trillions, not billions, by the end of the decade.
That’s why the NYSE’s move is timely.
After all, the exchange has reinvented itself before. And each time it did, it was responding to new technology that let money move faster and more efficiently.
Tokenization is the next step in that process.
It’s the next chapter in a very old story.
Regards,
Ian KingChief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing
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