Moody's Ratings has published findings from conversations with major US banks and financial market intermediaries that reveal a consistent institutional view on tokenization's trajectory: the transition will start gradually, focused on simpler segments like funds and short-term instruments running alongside traditional processes, before eventually hitting a tipping point at which adoption accelerates rapidly. "Across our conversations, industry leaders generally believed that broad asset tokenization will happen; the main uncertainties center around how quickly and in what sequence," Moody's said. The current tokenized real-world asset market has already grown more than 420% since the start of 2025 to $31.6 billion according to RWA.xyz, and almost all large banks have established dedicated digital asset teams or innovation units and are participating in industry pilots. Morgan Stanley tapped veteran executive Amy Oldenburg in January to lead its new crypto unit, weeks after announcing plans for crypto ETFs and a wallet — one of the clearest signals yet that major investment banks are building infrastructure now rather than waiting for demand to materialize.The strategic logic Moody's identified across its conversations is straightforward: institutions want to be ready to serve clients when adoption accelerates rather than scrambling to catch up after the tipping point arrives.

ARK Invest's projection of a $28 trillion digital asset market by 2030, with tokenized real-world assets as a key driver alongside Bitcoin, DeFi, and stablecoins, gives that preparation a concrete scale to build toward. The IMF has flagged financial stability concerns around rapid tokenization, and regulatory friction remains a genuine constraint on the pace of adoption. But the institutional consensus Moody's documented — "slow, then fast" — suggests that the question being debated inside major financial institutions is no longer whether to build tokenization infrastructure but how quickly to scale it and which asset classes to prioritize first.