{"id":12272,"date":"2026-08-23T22:41:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T22:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cryptonews.uk.com\/?p=12272"},"modified":"2026-08-23T22:41:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T22:41:12","slug":"the-next-phase-of-tokenization-is-utility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cryptonews.uk.com\/?p=12272","title":{"rendered":"The Next Phase of Tokenization Is Utility"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The following is a guest post and opinion from Vincent Maliepaard, VP of Marketing at Sentora.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tokenized funds have stopped being a novelty. Tokenized US Treasury funds alone now hold roughly $16 billion in distributed value and the list of issuers includes most of the largest names in traditional asset management. Issuance is a solved problem. The harder question is what happens to one of these assets after it exists onchain, because most of them currently do very little.<\/p>\n

The typical tokenized fund is held, occasionally transferred, and eventually redeemed. That is a real improvement in distribution and settlement, but it leaves the asset economically idle. The larger opportunity lies in financial utility: using a traditional asset inside an onchain system as collateral, as margin, or as a component of a structured position. The two outcomes look almost identical on a balance sheet, and they behave very differently in practice.<\/p>\n

\"RWA.xyz\"RWA.xyz
Source: Tokenized Treasury Funds \u2013 RWA.XYZ<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From Representation to Utility<\/h2>\n

Consider an investor holding a tokenized fund that owns $100 million of bonds. If that investor needs cash, the conventional path is to redeem the fund, wait for the underlying assets to settle, receive the proceeds, and then deploy that capital somewhere else. The plumbing is faster than it would be offchain, but the economics are unchanged. The investor gave up the position in order to access liquidity.<\/p>\n

The alternative is to deposit the same token into a lending market as collateral and borrow stablecoins against it. The credit exposure and its yield stay with the investor, the loan provides the cash, and nothing is sold. The function of the asset changes rather than the asset itself, and that shift is where tokenization begins to look like financial infrastructure rather than a faster distribution channel.<\/p>\n

In traditional markets, an enormous amount of financial machinery exists to mobilize the value sitting inside assets rather than simply to own them, and that machinery is what tokenization has the potential to make programmable.<\/p>\n

Why Collateral Is a Higher Standard Than Issuance<\/h2>\n

The difficulty is that a lending protocol cannot treat every tokenized asset as interchangeable. When ETH falls through a liquidation threshold, the protocol sells it into a market that runs continuously and whose depth is visible onchain. A tokenized credit portfolio behaves nothing like that. Its underlying bonds trade during traditional market hours, its NAV may be struck periodically rather than continuously, and redemption can take days. DeFi liquidates in minutes while traditional credit settles in days, and wrapping the asset in a token does not close that gap. Closing it requires design work around the token rather than inside it.<\/p>\n

The practical result is that an asset built for distribution and an asset built for collateral use should be held to quite different standards.<\/p>\n