Native Interoperability Is the Bet That Determines Your Relevance in Ten Years
The most expensive mistake in tokenization is assuming the digital ledger you pick today will still be the right one when market conditions change.
The reality is that the market is always evolving: consortium partners may leave, regulators redraw the map, or new blockchain rails emerge that would require you to rebuild integrations from scratch to access. These changes may not be on your radar, but none of them will wait for you to be ready. When they happen, speed is irrelevant. What matters is whether your infrastructure gives you the room or the necessary optionality to respond.
The bet nobody admits they're making
Every institution issuing tokenized assets today is making an implicit bet: that a specific digital ledger, tech stack, and set of counterparties will remain the right ones in five to ten years as the market matures.
History doesn't support that assumption. We’ve seen that payment rails have been rebuilt. Clearing networks have been rebuilt. Capital markets infrastructure has gone through fundamental overhauls every decade for the past century.
The institutions that came through each transition were never the ones most deeply committed to a technological framework. When electronic trading (ECNs) proliferated after the 1997 SEC order-handling rules, floor-based New York Stock Exchange specialists and dealer intermediaries lost order flow as spreads compressed and volume moved to faster venues. Nasdaq navigated the shift successfully because it was structured as an electronic dealer network. It had no physical floor to defend and responded by building its own electronic matching capability in 2002 rather than resisting the transition.
Digital assets will follow the same pattern. The difference is that the cycle is early enough that most institutions haven't experienced the consequences yet.
One network will not win
The future is omnichain, period. No single digital ledger will become the world's settlement layer. JPMorgan’s Kinexys, Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos have strong cases, but neither they nor any other ledger with stronger benchmarks will change that. Finance is too large, too regulated, and too jurisdictionally fragmented to consolidate onto a single rail. Different markets will run on different infrastructure, while different asset classes will need different technical and compliance requirements. That's not a prediction because it's already happened with every financial system before this one. We’re already seeing this evolution with application-based digital ledgers, customized to the product's requirements. Hyperliquid is one example that built its own custom blockchain for its product, without relying on a publicly available one.
Banks and Financial Institutions will need the same: to have purpose-built products for their specific customizations to meet their user’s needs, such as fast settlement, fee control, and privacy.
The winners won't be those who identify the dominant chain correctly. There won't be a dominant chain. The winners will be the ones whose infrastructure lets them connect to new networks, new liquidity, and new counterparties, without re-platforming every time the landscape is redrawn. That's the architecture spec for anyone planning to still be operating in 2035.
Interoperability is a business decision
Most teams treat interoperability as a checkbox: does this chain bridge to that chain? That framing undersells what's at stake. Native interoperability, built into the ledger from day one rather than added later via a vendor service or middleware, changes how your business operates over time. Here are three ways to show how:
Perpetual Competitive Advantage
Isolated digital ledgers compete for liquidity one silo at a time. A natively interoperable ledger captures global liquidity across the entire ecosystem, simultaneously. Your assets remain instantly accessible wherever the market moves.
Radical Agility and Flexibility
When a new settlement network launches, a stablecoin issuer gets cleared in a market you operate in, or a central bank pilots a digital currency you need to access, your response time matters. On closed infrastructure, each of those scenarios triggers a multi-quarter integration project and a new audit cycle. With native interoperability, those scenarios are easily achieved.
The reality is that creating a token has become a commodity and every company (if its relevant) will have an engine for creating tokens. So this isn’t an issue anymore. The challenge is maintaining connectivity to whatever financial infrastructure emerges next because that is what actually determines whether your platform remains relevant in three years.
It future-proofs you against what you can't predict or control
Here's a scenario that never gets included in a Request for Proposal (RFP). Consider a consortium of banks, a custodian, and a clearing layer. One participant exits due to a regulatory shift, an M&A activity, sanctions, or a strategic pivot. The consortium's network is now missing a key piece, and the assets you tokenized need a new home.
In a closed system, this is an existential problem. You're rebuilding the relationship layer from scratch, under pressure, with live assets on the line. McKinsey captured this dynamic well with its reference to “cash islands,” namely the position banks find themselves in when tokenizing deposits on closed systems. When the consortium breaks, you are left on the island with no way off.
With native interoperability, this is only a routing problem. You can connect to a different network, a different counterparty set, a different jurisdiction if you have to utilizing your existing assets and adhering to your compliance requirements.
What this looks like in the Cosmos Tokenization Suite
IBC, the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol, was built to solve the connectivity problem that closed infrastructure cannot. It is the interoperability framework of the Cosmos Tokenization Suite.
A conventional cross-ledger asset “bridge” creates a dependency between two systems that were never designed to communicate with each other. Instead, IBC provides interoperability at the base layer. However, IBC is not a bridge. Digital ledgers that run on it communicate natively, each maintaining independent sovereignty of its own infrastructure. This creates a trust model that is much closer to how the internet works.
That's the difference between “can technically connect” and “was built to connect”.
The institutions already operating on this stack reflect that logic. A top 5 global bank is running tokenization of $3T+ in assets across internal and external markets. MUFG and a consortium of partners built Progmat, which holds over 48% share of Japan's tokenized asset issuance market. Progmat runs on IBC for interoperability. Neither is betting on one chain winning.
To win, build on infrastructure designed for a world that keeps changing. A decade from now, the digital ledgers that will still matter will be the ones that stayed connected through every shift, rather than the ones that were fastest, cheapest, or most hyped in 2026.
About the author
Ian Kane is Head of Partnerships at Cosmos, helping banks and financial institutions navigate the convergence of tokenization, AI, and digital assets. His background spans enterprise partnerships, go-to-market strategy, fundraising, and scaling businesses across fintech and blockchain, with a career focused on translating complex technology into products, partnerships, and revenue at the intersection of emerging technology and regulated industries.
