SEC Willing to Engage with Tokenized Asset Issuers, SEC’s Hester Peirce Says

SINGAPORE — SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said Tuesday that the regulator is open to engaging with industry participants on tokenizing products, while emphasising the complexity of how these tokenized assets interact with their traditional counterparts.

"We are willing to work with people who want to tokenize, we urge them to come talk to us," Peirce said while speaking at the Digital Assets Summit in Singapore.

A tokenized security is a blockchain-based digital representation of ownership or rights in an underlying asset, such as stocks or bonds. It means the same security can exist in both traditional paper certificates and electronic certificates, as well as in blockchain-based tokens.

The key issue Peirce pointed to is understanding how these different forms of the same security relate to and interact with one another.

"Some of the questions are how does a tokenized security interact with other iterations of the security and other forms of that security," Peirce explained, while calling for a nuanced approach to regulating tokenization, saying,

"Depending on how things are tokenized, it could be one of many different things," she noted.

Tokenization stands out as one of the few cryptocurrency sub-sectors, alongside stablecoins, with significant real-world applications. Financial institutions worldwide are adopting tokenization to improve market liquidity and operational efficiency, driving a transformative shift in how assets are issued, traded, and managed in the global financial system.

As of Tuesday, the total on-chain tokenisation market was valued at $31 billion, according to RWA.xyz, with $714 million of that being tokenized stocks.

McKinsey analysis indicates that the market cap of all tokenized assets could reach around $2 trillion by 2030.