Real World Assets on Cosmos
Tokenization is expanding across capital markets. Asset managers, banks, and financial firms are now issuing and managing tokenized treasuries, credit assets, equities, and other instruments as part of their core operations. Stablecoins represent close to $250 billion in circulating value, while tokenized U.S. Treasuries reached roughly $5.6 billion in assets under management by April 2025, growing more than five times year over year. Analysts at Citi estimate that tokenized assets could reach $4 to $5 trillion by 2030, with other forecasts placing the opportunity even higher.
For many institutional leaders, the question has shifted from whether capital markets move on-chain to which blockchain systems can support liquidity, compliance, and operational performance at scale.
Key takeaways
- Institutions are increasingly tokenizing their existing assets and treasury instruments
- Distribution and liquidity access are defining success factors.
- Capital markets require blockchain solutions with governance and compliance controls.
FIs gain profit, distribution, and operational benefits from asset tokenization
Clear business outcomes drive capital markets onto blockchain infrastructure: ledger-based settlement reduces reconciliation across custodians, transfer agents, and clearing systems. Asset managers benefit from faster time-to-cash, while banks minimize counterparty exposure and operational overhead.
Tokenization also expands distribution. Assets can be fractionalized and made available across regions and platforms without rebuilding product structures for each venue. Modular blockchains let businesses create tailored systems that automatically enforce their compliance and operational rules. These advantages are strongest for cash equivalents, credit products, and exchange-traded instruments, which explains why adoption has accelerated first in these segments.
Why Cosmos fits capital markets use cases
Cosmos allows institutions to own and operate internal or managed blockchain solutions that provide full control over governance, security, access control, use case customization, and compliance, while still connecting to liquidity across other networks. This design mirrors traditional financial infrastructure in that institutions retain ownership of their systems while accessing external markets.
Cosmos pioneered the world’s first open-source blockchain development platform in 2016, which today powers 150+ interoperable blockchains in production. In recent years, the Cosmos stack has become the preferred choice by many regulated financial institutions, including Provenance, the infrastructure for Figure, the leading non-bank home equity line of credit lender in the USA, and Progmat, Japan’s largest regulated tokenization platform and a joint venture of MUFG, Mizuho, and SMB.
These institutions use the battle-tested Cosmos technology to build custom digital ledgers that integrate with existing financial systems in regulated environments. Distribution is handled through the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, which allows assets issued on an institutional chain to reach other enabled blockchains and to be settled against stablecoins, while the issuing chain retains sovereignty over the asset's core rules and issuance.
This combination of customization and connectivity has led multiple enterprises and institutions to build on Cosmos.
Injective: Institutional digital securities infrastructure
Injective is addressing fragmentation in digital securities markets by providing purpose-built financial infrastructure for tokenized asset issuance and trading. They built the native primitives and interoperability standards required for institutional capital markets and large-scale tokenization.
Among other initiatives, DigiShares and publicly listed company Valereum selected Injective to deploy their end-to-end digital securities platform. Built on Injective's finance-first architecture and the ERC-7943 interoperability standard, the integration enables single-asset tokenization of real estate, pre-IPO equity, and alternative assets with institutional-grade settlement. Valereum's secondary trading platform leverages Injective's on-chain order book and cross-chain capabilities to deliver a unified experience for institutions to perform due diligence, invest, and trade digital securities.
Ondo Finance: Liquidity for tokenized equities and fixed income
Ondo Finance addresses one of the central challenges in tokenized markets: liquidity. Early tokenized equities often traded at large premiums or discounts due to thin market depth and slow arbitrage. To solve this, Ondo Global Markets connects tokenized assets directly to public exchange liquidity. Users fund purchases with stablecoins, Ondo acquires the underlying securities on regulated venues, and redemptions keep prices aligned. Partnerships with firms such as Franklin Templeton and BlackRock have positioned Ondo as a bridge for distribution between traditional finance and on-chain markets.
In March 2024, Ondo moved roughly $95 million of collateral into BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized money market fund, enabling continuous redemptions rather than T+2 settlement. Ondo GM, built on the Cosmos Stack, now offers access to hundreds of tokenized equities and ETFs, demonstrating how tokenization can scale without fragmenting liquidity.
Lombard: Bitcoin as capital markets collateral
Lombard Finance is repositioning Bitcoin as a productive asset in capital markets. Its liquid-staked Bitcoin token, LBTC, surpassed $1 billion in total value locked in its first three months, with most of the supply actively deployed across on-chain financial markets.
Institutional participation has been central to Lombard’s growth. Franklin Templeton participated in its $16 million seed round, and security oversight is provided by a consortium that includes Wintermute, Galaxy, and DCG. Anchored by a Cosmos-based coordination layer, the Lombard Ledger, Lombard shows how digital-native assets can support lending, collateral, and investment products within regulated financial contexts.
ZIGChain: Retail access to global equities
ZIGChain, built using the Cosmos Stack, was announced in 2024 by Zignaly alongside a $100 million ecosystem fund. ZIGChain combines brokerage rails with blockchain settlement to provide retail investors with global access to tokenized equities.
The project recently partnered with Apex Group, a $3.4 trillion fund administrator, to launch a regulated on-chain fund structure focused on real-world asset tokenization. ZIGChain used the Cosmos infrastructure for governance, permissioning, and interoperability to support this institutional setup.
Conclusion
Capital markets are increasingly moving on-chain, where the economics support it. Tokenized cash, credit, and securities are now operating at a multi-billion-dollar scale, supported by regulated firms and expanding distribution.
Injective’s digital securities infrastructure, Ondo’s tokenized equities, Lombard’s Bitcoin-based collateral, and ZIGChain’s retail distribution model, these systems demonstrate blockchain infrastructure operating at production scale. Looking ahead, institutional leaders should treat tokenization as a strategic consideration rather than an afterthought in planning.