Christopher Louis Tsu, CEO at Venom Foundation, a fintech company specializing in high-performance blockchain solutions.
Most conversations about tokenizing real-world assets in developing economies focus on the wrong problem. The technical challenge isn’t putting assets on a blockchain; that’s the easy part. The real complexity, and where strategic advantage lies, is making those tokens recognizable, tradable and reusable across borders and banking systems. This is what separates a digitized asset from a liquid one.
Boston Consulting Group estimates that $16 trillion in illiquid assets could be unlocked through tokenization by 2030. But that figure focuses primarily on existing institutional assets in developed markets. When you account for sovereign wealth funds, state-owned enterprise equity, natural resource rights, infrastructure concessions, agricultural assets and carbon credits across all developing economies, based on my experience as CEO of a fintech company, I estimate that we’re looking at at least $200 trillion in unrealized value. So, the question isn’t whether to tokenize—it’s whether you understand the technical complexity required to unlock actual liquidity.
The Spectrum Of Fungibility
Here’s the technical reality that most miss: An asset token must achieve what I call a “spectrum of fungibility” to have real value. Fungibility means the token can be exchanged, recognized and accepted across different systems and jurisdictions, like how a U.S. dollar works anywhere in the world.
For example, when a central bank tokenizes $5 billion in infrastructure bonds, those tokens need to be tradable in Singapore, recognizable by banks in Dubai and settleable through existing payment systems. The token must carry embedded compliance data, maintain transparent ownership records, work across multiple blockchain networks and trigger automated regulatory reporting in each jurisdiction it touches.
The hard part here isn’t digitizing the asset. It’s building the connectivity layer that makes different financial systems recognize and accept the same tokenized asset.
What Assets?
We’re talking about sovereign financial assets, government bonds, Treasury bills and sovereign wealth funds like Malaysia’s Khazanah managing аpproximately $38 billion. There are also natural resource rights, such as oil and gas licenses and mining concessions, where governments hold substantial assets that generate revenue but can’t easily be traded or used as collateral in international markets. Infrastructure concessions from toll roads to airports are also included, as well as carbon credits in a market projected to hit $100 billion by 2030.
Finance ministers and central bank governors have these assets on their balance sheets, generating limited returns because they can’t access global capital markets. Tokenization changes that, but only if the technical foundation is right.
Interbank Movement: The Real Challenge
You can tokenize anything. But it’s useless unless it’s marketable across borders and banking systems.
The SWIFT network—the backbone of international banking—recently announced integration with blockchain-based systems specifically to solve this problem. Using ISO 20022 standards, institutions can now initiate blockchain transactions using their existing systems.
Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol enables these messages to trigger smart contract executions across multiple blockchains. Major institutions, including UBS and BNP Paribas, have demonstrated tokenized fund subscriptions using SWIFT messages combined with blockchain settlement. (Disclosure: The author is a client of Chainlink and UBS Switzerland.)
The key insight: You don’t rebuild financial infrastructure. You implement connectivity layers that make tokenized assets interoperable with existing systems.
Regulation: The Critical Foundation
Technical interoperability means nothing without regulatory compliance. Every tokenized asset must carry embedded compliance data: know-your-customer information, anti-money laundering checks, beneficial ownership records and automated regulatory reporting capabilities.
Smart contracts can automate much of this. A tokenized infrastructure bond can be programmed to only accept investments from qualified institutional buyers, automatically withhold appropriate taxes and report transactions to multiple regulators simultaneously.
Why Now: Infrastructure Has Matured
Five years ago, implementing these solutions required expensive custom development. Today, the building blocks exist: ISO 20022-compliant messaging systems, cross-chain interoperability protocols and standardized smart contract libraries for compliance.
SWIFT’s adoption of blockchain infrastructure isn’t experimental—it’s production-ready. What’s needed now is strategic implementation, choosing the right assets to tokenize, structuring them for genuine cross-border fungibility and ensuring regulatory compliance from day one.
What Success Requires
For developing economies to capture this opportunity, several elements must align. First, they need clarity on which assets create immediate value when tokenized. Sovereign bonds, infrastructure concessions and carbon credits typically offer the clearest path to liquidity.
Second, they need to understand that tokenization is fundamentally about interoperability, not just digitization. The goal is to create assets that are truly fungible across borders and banking systems.
Third, they must build with regulatory compliance embedded from the start. Retrofitting compliance onto tokenized assets is expensive and often impossible.
Fourth, they’ll want to leverage existing financial infrastructure rather than replace it. The SWIFT integration model demonstrates how blockchain can enhance rather than disrupt existing systems. This is why blockchain platforms purpose-built for institutional adoption gain traction, where consumer-oriented platforms often struggle to bridge into traditional finance.
Finally, they need to focus on practical value creation rather than technological novelty. In Venom’s work with governments and financial institutions across Asia, I’ve seen that the most successful implementations prioritize solving immediate pain points—like enabling cross-border settlement of infrastructure bonds—over building feature-rich platforms that nobody uses.
The Path Ahead
I believe that the $200 trillion opportunity in developing economy assets is real. But capitalizing on it requires moving beyond the hype cycle to focus on the hard technical problems: interoperability, regulatory compliance and genuine liquidity creation.
The infrastructure exists. The regulatory frameworks are evolving. What’s needed now is strategic focus on high-value use cases and rigorous implementation that prioritizes fungibility over feature lists.
The future of sovereign finance will be tokenized, interoperable and accessible. The question for developing economies is whether they’ll lead this transition or be forced to adopt standards set by others.
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