Tokenisation: the future of finance is now, and the rules of investing have changed forever

Overnight, Saturday 28 February, something signaled that finance is changing, and traditional finance noticed.

While US-Israeli airstrikes hit Iran, oil prices surged more than 30% to nearly US$120 a barrel. Traders around the world scrambled for exposure.

The problem? The CME doesn't trade on weekends. Neither does the ICE, nor the NYMEX.

Hyperliquid, however, is always open.

For years, tokenisation has lived in whitepapers and working groups. The infrastructure is now real, and suddenly, it was pricing a war.

On that night, it became the world's premier venue for oil price discovery - gold and silver too, with traders piling into perpetual contracts across all three as the only available hedge while traditional markets slept.

A decentralised crypto exchange, Hyperliquid is the kind of platform that a few years ago existed solely to serve the needs of crypto natives’ thirst for leverage. Now, the likes of Bloomberg & JPMorgan, are covering this trend shift.

A week following this, Trade[XYZ], a tokenised products issuer built on Hyperliquid, formally partnered with S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch the first officially licensed S&P 500 perpetual futures contract on a decentralised blockchain.

The custodian of the world's most important financial benchmark had decided to go on-chain.

So, what is tokenisation?

Simply put: taking a real-world asset and representing it as a digital token on a blockchain. A bond, a share, a property, a barrel of oil. Even a Pokémon card, if you want. Instead of ownership sitting inside traditional financial infrastructure with brokers, custodians and clearing houses, it lives on a distributed ledger that settles instantly, runs continuously, and doesn't care what day of the week it is.

The mechanics aren't the interesting part. What's interesting is what falls away when you remove the legacy plumbing: the settlement delays, the intermediary fees, the geographic restrictions, and the opening hours.

TradFi joins the party

On March 18, the SEC approved Nasdaq's proposal to allow Russell 1000 stocks and major index ETFs to trade in tokenised form, officially integrating blockchain technology into US equity market infrastructure. Nasdaq's president called it a step toward "an always-on financial ecosystem."

However, it is worth being clear about what this is and isn't. Trades still clear on T+1. The tokenisation happens after settlement, not during it. Instant settlement and 24/7 equity trading are still a few years away. But the direction is set.

Closer to home, the RBA's Project Acacia isn’t asking if tokenisation is viable in Australia's financial system, but how it can be implemented. Their analysis put potential efficiency gains at $24 billion per annum, a number that makes more sense when you consider that the way Australian banks raise term deposit funding has barely changed in a generation, still running largely on phones, email and spreadsheets.

Stablecoins

Underneath all this sits stablecoin infrastructure, dollar-pegged digital tokens that have quietly become the plumbing of the new financial system. Stablecoin transfer volume hit US$33 trillion in 2025, up 72% year-on-year. Circle's USDC alone processed US$11.9 trillion in on-chain volume across the year.

The payments incumbents have clearly noticed. Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge for US$1.1 billion. Mastercard bought BVNK for up to US$1.8 billion. Visa and Bridge are rolling out stablecoin-linked cards to more than 100 countries by the end of 2026. Research firm Citrini recently explored what this world would look like in a few years, their thesis being that AI agents programmed to minimise transaction costs will eventually route around Visa and Mastercard's 2-3% interchange fees entirely, using stablecoins where the same transaction costs fractions of a cent. Visa and Mastercard stocks are both down nearly 20% from their peaks. The market is paying attention.

In Australia, AUD-denominated stablecoins are beginning to emerge, Macropod's AUDM among them, early signs of local digital dollar infrastructure being built out beneath the surface.

As a personal example of the improvements tokenised rails can offer: I recently tried to convert a USD-denominated equity position back into AUD through my brokerage account. Three days, multiple intermediaries, fees that added up.

On-chain, I can swap a tokenised equity position into USDC and then into AUD in minutes, at any hour, for a fraction of the cost. The longer you operate across both worlds, the harder it becomes to justify routing capital back through legacy rails just to experience slower, more expensive settlement. The gravitational pull is real, not ideological, but practical. Capital follows the path of least resistance, and that path is increasingly on-chain.

What to watch

Tokenisation won't replace traditional financial infrastructure overnight. The more likely path is gradual coexistence, tokenised systems running alongside legacy markets while regulators find their footing. But a few things are worth keeping an eye on.

The 24/7 dimension is underappreciated. When geopolitical events move oil prices on a Saturday, the ability to trade in real time has genuine value. As more assets migrate to tokenised rails, the weekday-only, business-hours-only model of traditional finance starts to look less like a feature and more like a legacy constraint.

Settlement efficiency matters too, even if it's arriving incrementally. Faster settlement reduces counterparty risk and frees capital. For institutions running large balance sheets, that compounds quickly.

The technology is not new. What is new is that it's working, at scale, in real markets, on a Saturday night when the CME is dark and you need to know what oil costs.

Sources

Tokenisation: What It Actually Means for Australian Investors

BlackRock ICS US Dollar Liquidity Fund

About Kinexys: Our Story, Leadership and More | J.P. Morgan

Project Agora: Exploring Tokenisation of Cross-Border Payments