Evolving Capital Markets with Blockchain Technology

Introduction

Tokenization is no longer a proof-of-concept. It is becoming the operating model for asset managers, banks, and firms that handle treasuries, securities, commodities and IP. Stablecoins now account for nearly $250 billion in circulating value, with regulated issuers anchoring reserves in U.S. Treasuries. Tokenized treasuries themselves have grown to roughly $5.6 billion AUM by April 2025, up more than five-fold from the prior year. Analysts at Citi estimate $4–5 trillion in tokenized assets by 2030, while BCG frames a $16 trillion opportunity.

The trend is now defined by distribution. Robinhood began offering tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs to EU customers via Arbitrum in mid-2025. Tokenization specialist Dinari launched its own L1 blockchain aiming to become the “DTCC of tokenized stocks.” And in August, Figure Technology filed for a U.S. IPO, disclosing $191 million in H1 revenue and a swing to profitability. These are not pilots, they are regulated, revenue-bearing businesses operating on top of blockchain and distributed-ledger-technology (DLT).

The strategic question for institutional leaders is no longer if capital markets move onchain, but how these solutions will be built on-chain to deliver the functional capabilities, liquidity, and operational efficiency at scale. The answer, increasingly, is Cosmos and its technology stack.

The Blockchain Opportunity

There are several tangible benefits of real-world assets (RWAs) and capital markets moving to programmable, next-generation blockchain infrastructure:

• Operational Efficiency and Cost Reduction: Immutable, ledger-based registries and settlement eliminate duplicative reconciliations across custodians, transfer agents, and clearinghouses. For banks and asset managers, this means faster time-to-cash, reduced counterparty risk, and materially lower back-office and compliance overhead.
• Liquidity Access and Product Innovation: Tokenization creates fractional, programmable assets that can be distributed across global markets instantly. This allows asset managers to broaden investor access, PSPs and fintechs to embed capital markets into their platforms, and banks to originate new products with inherited liquidity from traditional venues.
• Regulatory Alignment with Programmability: Sovereign blockchains allow enterprises to encode jurisdiction-specific compliance, KYC/AML checks, and governance directly at the protocol layer. For regulated institutions, this delivers confidence to scale blockchain-based offerings while meeting supervisory requirements, with programmability enabling real-time auditability and transparent reporting.

Why Cosmos for Capital Markets

The Cosmos is designed for precisely this moment. Institutions can launch sovereign blockchains with full control over governance, compliance logic, and data schemas, while still connecting seamlessly to liquidity across other blockchain networks like Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana — or other financial, private networks.

• Complete customization with EVM compatibility: The Cosmos Stack enables enterprises and institutions to build vertically-integrated blockchains with complete control over its structure and execution, including important features like EVM compatibility.
• Risk management and compliance: Firms encode compliance and risk policies at the chain level.
• Unit economics: Lifecycle events speed up reconciliation and reduce middle-office costs. Current customers of the Cosmos Stack like the HELOC lender Figure show that this translates into profitability, and better overall rates for customers.
• Distribution: Assets issued on an institutional chain can reach new venues via the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol, a protocol for transferring assets across different blockchains. They can settle against stablecoins, reach DeFi venues, or integrate with traditional brokerages.

This mixture of customizability with fully-owned infrastructure is why projects like Provenance and Figure, Ondo, Lombard and ZIGChain have chosen Cosmos.

How Customers are Leveraging the Cosmos Stack to Disrupt and Scale Finance Services

Figure and the Provenance blockchain: Regulated Lending at Scale

Figure Technology, operator of the Provenance blockchain, has become the largest non-bank HELOC lender in the US, processing more than 200,000 lifetime loans with approvals in minutes. In its IPO filing, supported by Goldman Sachs, Jefferies and BofA Securities, Figure reported $191 million in first-half 2025 revenue and $29 million in profit, supported by distribution partnerships with more than 160 institutions.

By recording loans onchain through digital asset registration (DARTs) instead of legacy systems like MERS, the company streamlines origination and servicing. This has, in turn, attracted the likes of Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Jefferies and more than half of the top 20 independent mortgage banks to list on the DART-powered Figure Connect loan marketplace.

Figure used the Cosmos Stack to build the Provenance blockchain, which enables these tokenized use cases. This is not a blockchain pilot. It is a profitable, regulated credit business at IPO scale. This has allowed Figure to offer faster loan settlement/processing (hours, over months) and faster/easier liquidity sourcing and trading of loans, resulting in much lower fees for all participants and customers.

Ondo Finance: Liquidity for Tokenized Equities

Tokenized stocks often struggled with shallow liquidity and wide spreads. At one point, a tokenized version of Apple (AAPL) traded at a 14.92% premium to its underlying equity due to extremely thin market depth. Ondo Finance argues that such dislocations are not isolated launch issues, but stem from structural frictions, similar to how stablecoins deviate from their peg when redemptions are gated and arbitrage cannot move fast enough.

Ondo Global Markets (GM) solved this by tying tokenized assets directly to public exchange liquidity: users fund purchases with stablecoins, Ondo acquires the stock on venues like NASDAQ, and instant redemptions keep prices aligned. Its strong strategic alliance with asset managers like Franklin Templeton and BlackRock has enabled Ondo to position itself as a key distribution player between traditional finance and DeFi.

As a result, Ondo has expanded its institutional footprint in fixed income. In 2025, it moved roughly $95 million of OUSG collateral into BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized money market fund, enabling 24/7 redemptions, a major breakthrough compared to T+2 settlement cycles. Its new Ondo Nexus platform also integrates tokenized Treasury and MMF products from Franklin Templeton and other issuers, creating a shared liquidity and settlement layer for tokenized fixed-income assets.

In June, Ondo Finance announced the launch of Ondo GM, giving investors seamless access to hundreds of tokenized equities and ETFs. Ondo GM is built on the Cosmos Stack. For capital markets institutions, this model shows how tokenization can scale without duplicating liquidity structures. Ondo recently announced plans to offer tokenized ETFs via Ondo GM for users in select jurisdictions, furthering their intent to provide investors exposure to out-of-market assets and new diversification strategies.

For capital markets institutions, Ondo’s model demonstrates how tokenization can scale without duplicating liquidity structures, while offering direct connectivity into regulated products backed by the world’s largest asset managers, possible only by deploying a performant, reliable and confidential blockchain infrastructure built on the Cosmos Stack.

Lombard: Bitcoin as Collateral for Capital Markets

Lombard Finance is positioning Bitcoin as an active capital markets asset rather than a passive store of value. Since launching its liquid-staked Bitcoin token, LBTC, the protocol has surpassed $1 billion in TVL in just 92 days, onboarding more than $2 billion in net-new BTC liquidity, with over 80 percent of its supply actively deployed across DeFi. This growth demonstrates strong demand for turning the world’s largest crypto asset into a productive programmable instrument.

Institutional alignment has been central to Lombard’s strategy. Franklin Templeton participated in its $16 million seed round, signaling interest from one of the largest global asset managers in Bitcoin-backed capital market products. Security and governance are overseen by the Lombard Security Consortium, which includes Wintermute, OKX, Galaxy, and DCG, providing institutional-grade validation and risk management. On the distribution side, LBTC is supported by exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, and Bitget, ensuring global liquidity and access.

For banks, fintechs, and asset managers, Lombard illustrates how Bitcoin can evolve into a compliant, yield-bearing collateral asset. By aligning institutional security practices with DeFi distribution, it creates a pathway for BTC to serve as the foundation of new lending, derivatives, and tokenized investment products within blockchain-based capital markets.

ZIGChain: Retail Access to Global Equities

ZIGChain, built with the Cosmos Stack, was announced in 2025 by social-investing platform Zignaly, alongside a $100M ecosystem fund backed by DWF Labs. Its mission is democratizing access to tokenized equities and investment products for a global retail base, combining brokerage rails with blockchain settlement. This removes reliance on fragmented, intermediary-heavy financial rails, enabling real-time settlement, global investor access, and transparent compliance in ways that traditional custody and clearing systems cannot deliver.

Additionally, ZIGChain recently announced its strategic partnership with Apex Group, a $3.4 trillion fund administrator, to launch the region’s first fully regulated, onchain fund ecosystem focused on real‑world asset tokenization. The initiative, unveiled in Dubai alongside Tokeny, Truleum Venture Partners, Disrupt.com, and Zamanat, aims to provide a modular, Shariah‑compliant infrastructure for launching and managing tokenized funds at institutional scale. The battle-tested nature of the Cosmos Stack provided ZIGChain with the robust components it required to build the infrastructure to support these partnerships.

Looking Ahead

Capital markets are migrating onchain first where the economics are most compelling: cash-equivalents, credit assets, and exchange-traded securities. With multi-billion AUM in tokenized treasuries, stablecoins at scale, retail distribution through brokerages, and a blockchain lender filing for a US IPO, the facts and figures speak for themselves.

Cosmos has emerged as the backbone of this transition. Its modular stack enables institutions to build highly-customizable, fast, secure and compliant financial infrastructure while retaining connectivity across global liquidity networks. From Figure’s IPO filing to Ondo’s tokenized stocks, the evolution of capital markets and migration towards dedicated blockchains by Figure, Lombard, Ondo, ZIGChain and many more financial institutions signals a shift in how blockchain is no longer viewed as a nice-to-have technical differentiator, but a vital strategic business component. For institutional leaders, the message is clear: tokenization is no longer optional.

(A version of this post originally appeared on the Cosmos Community Blog on Medium.)