What Turns a Tokenised Holding into a Service

Institutions assessing their readiness for adopting tokenised assets tend to begin with the obvious questions. Where is the revenue? Which value-added services can we offer? How much of our clients’ activity can we realistically capture? Those questions shape risk appetite, investment priorities and – ultimately – the scope of what infrastructure an institution decides it needs to build. But they all rest on a more fundamental question that is easy to underestimate: what can the institution actually do with an asset once it holds it?

Holding a tokenised fund, bond or other instrument is, in itself, not a particularly differentiated capability. The value lies in the actions that can be performed around that holding. Can it be valued in real time? Can it be pledged as collateral or substituted for another asset when an exposure changes? Can it be lent? Can it be transferred under defined governance rules? Can the institution evidence control, maintain an appropriate audit trail and report on the position within its existing operational and regulatory framework? These are the types of capabilities that turn a tokenised holding into a service. Importantly, they are much the same regardless of the instrument.

A bank or asset manager which can value, pledge, substitute, lend, transfer, evidence control and report on a tokenised fund does not need to reinvent those capabilities when a tokenised bond arrives. The underlying asset may be different, the network on which it exists may be different and the legal or operational parameters may change, but the fundamental actions clients expect an institution to perform remain remarkably consistent. That should perhaps change the way institutions think about their readiness for digital asset adoption.

Holding is only the starting point

There is a tendency in digital asset infrastructure to organise technology decisions around asset classes or individual use cases. A new tokenised instrument creates a new project. A client asks to use a holding as collateral so another platform is introduced. A different team wants to support lending so yet another service is integrated.

The result is a collection of capabilities built around individual products rather than a coherent model for servicing assets. This approach may work when tokenisation is experimental and volumes are limited, but it becomes much harder to sustain as the number of instruments, networks and client requirements grow. Demand does not really sit in the holding of an asset but rather in the actions built around it.

An institution does not generate significant value merely by telling a client that it can custody a tokenised money market fund. The more interesting question is whether that client can mobilise the asset, use it as collateral, substitute it when required, transfer it under controlled conditions and receive the same quality of reporting and evidencing they would expect from any other institutional holding.

The scale of existing collateral activity illustrates the opportunity. According to a recent report published by the trade association Global Digital Finance on unlocking capital with US tokenised money market funds for collateral mobility, around $1.6 trillion in margin was posted or received on non-cleared trades at the end of 2025, while 44% of institutions expect to accept tokenised funds as collateral.

The significance of tokenisation, then, is not simply that more assets can be represented on a network. It is that assets which have historically been operationally constrained can become more readily mobilised. However, that potential is only realised if the institution can act on them.

Build once for the actions clients really need

This conclusion points towards a different architecture. Rather than building separate infrastructure for each tokenised asset or each new service, institutions need a common capability layer which sits between their existing systems and the networks on which those assets reside.

Above that layer sit the systems the institution already relies on, such as portfolio management, treasury, risk, compliance, accounting, reporting and client servicing. Below it are the increasingly diverse networks, protocols and tokenisation environments where assets are issued, held and transferred. The infrastructure layer in between should provide the common actions: valuation, pledging, substitution, lending, governed transfer, evidenced control and reporting.

This does not mean forcing every asset into an identical workflow. Different instruments will have different eligibility criteria, settlement processes, legal structures and network-specific requirements. But those differences should be handled at the edge, rather than requiring the institution to rebuild its core capabilities every time a new asset or network is introduced.

Just as importantly, a model such as this should not require an institution to surrender control of its own environment. Key control should remain with the institution, and governance should remain within its own operating model. The purpose of such an infrastructure layer is to connect existing systems to external networks without fragmenting controls across a growing collection of specialist platforms. Built this way, the capability layer becomes reusable.

Whether an institution adds a tokenised fund, a tokenised bond, a new blockchain network or another class of tokenised instrument, the requirement becomes to connect it to an existing set of capabilities rather than to begin another standalone technology project.

The alternative is to build service-by-service. Every new client requirement then introduces another integration, another platform and another set of operational dependencies. Over time, the challenge is no longer supporting tokenised assets. It is managing the complexity created by the way those capabilities were added.

The real measure of readiness

The readiness question for tokenised assets should not be what can institutions or custodians hold, but rather what can they do and where can they apply those capabilities.

An institution may technically support several tokenised instruments while having very limited ability to mobilise them. Another may initially support fewer assets but have a common infrastructure layer capable of applying a broad set of actions across everything it brings into its environment. The second institution is arguably much better positioned for the market that is now emerging.

Assets will arrive one at a time – and they will keep on arriving. Tokenised funds, bonds, deposits, stablecoins and other forms of digital representation will each create their own headlines and business cases. But the actions clients want institutions to perform on those assets have been stable for years. They want to value them, use them as collateral or move them under defined controls. They want to lend, substitute, evidence and report on them.

Institutions that build their infrastructure around individual assets will keep asking what needs to be built next, whereas institutions that build for those actions will find that each new instrument is something they already know how to service. If traditional finance’s adoption of digital assets is to succeed and scale, this is the only sustainable approach.

This article is general industry commentary. It does not describe services offered by Zodia Custody or its affiliates, which vary by entity and jurisdiction and are subject to regulatory permissions.