[Recap] Tokenized Assets at Scale: The Future of Capital Markets Across Bitcoin, Ethereum & Next-Gen Chains

On February 4th, 2026, The Tie hosted an Innovator Series webinar on institutional infrastructure for tokenized capital markets, moderated by Sacha Ghebali, Chief Strategy Officer at The Tie. The panel featured Rena Shah, COO and President of the Stacks Foundation; Joanita Titan, Head of Institutional Growth at Monad Foundation; and Eric Saraniecki, Co-Founder and Head of Network Strategy at Digital Asset, the company behind the Canton Network. With on-chain tokenized real-world assets quadrupling from roughly $5 billion to over $20 billion (source: RWA.xyz) over the past year (excluding stablecoins), the discussion examined three infrastructure approaches; Bitcoin as a collateral layer, high-performance EVMs, and privacy-first rails for regulated activity.

Watch the full Webinar here:

Market Landscape: Acceleration or Visibility?

Eric Saraniecki pushed back on the popular narrative that tokenization is suddenly accelerating. "I kind of reject the notion that there's this acceleration," he said. "People have not been paying attention to the stuff that's been happening for a long time." He pointed to JPMorgan's largely overlooked work over the past decade as evidence that institutional tokenization has been building steadily. He maintains that it's the visibility, not the pace, that has changed.

Rena Shah was more measured, noting that institutional adoption "is not even close to being what we would define as success as an industry." Most institutional collateral activity still runs through bank custody and off-chain lending, which is what Stacks, the largest Bitcoin Layer 2, aims to change.

Bitcoin as a Productive Collateral Layer

Shah made the case for Bitcoin's role in capital markets. "Bitcoin year over year has emerged as the best reserve collateral asset," she explained, but institutions still overwhelmingly prefer off-chain custody. Stacks, which has operated since launching its genesis block in 2018, provides an L2 environment where Bitcoin derivative assets support staking and lending, turning a static treasury holding into productive collateral.

She also raised a friction point: institutions consistently underestimate cross-chain risk assessment. "No two blockchains are the same. No two markets are the same," Shah noted. "There isn't a clear way of how you're going to do risk monitoring across different chains." For 2026, Stacks has one KPI: 100,000 Bitcoin staked and deployed across DeFi.

High-Performance EVM: Monad's Issuance-to-Utility Thesis

Joanita Titan said Monad's approach centers on a problem she sees institutions repeatedly stumble on: treating tokenization as the finish line rather than the starting point. "Tokenizing an asset is really just a starting point," she said. "The real value comes from making the asset useful and liquid."

Monad, a Layer 1 blockchain built for high throughput at low cost while maintaining EVM compatibility, targets two specific unlocks: tokenized assets that plug directly into trading venues and lending markets, and active work to attract allocators and liquidity so issuers aren't minting assets into a vacuum. Titan, who previously held roles at JPMorgan, Anchorage Digital, and FalconX, emphasized that institutional clients need functioning secondary markets, not just a tokenization platform.

Privacy-First Infrastructure: Canton's Institutional Rails

Saraniecki explained why privacy is the non-negotiable requirement most public blockchains fail to address. Canton is a public, permissionless L1 with programmable privacy, designed so that counterparties see only what they need to see while regulators retain appropriate oversight. The network processes trillions in monthly RWA transaction volume, with Broadridge alone running over $8 trillion per month in repo transactions on the platform.

Canton's primary KPI isn't TVL, a metric Saraniecki called a "misconception" that most chains fixate on. Instead, Digital Asset tracks network burn, which reflects actual asset velocity. "Treasury that gets pledged as collateral and re-pledged and used in repo and re-hypothecated generates burn," he said. "That activity is important."

Bridging Traditional and On-Chain Capital Markets

All three panelists agreed: the biggest friction in institutional tokenization is what comes after primary issuance. Titan noted that institutions "focus very heavily on the primary issuance and sometimes overlook how to unlock the utility and distribution post-launch." Saraniecki urged institutions to ask early: "What is the incremental utility that this produces by being on-chain?" His advice was blunt: start simple and build institutional knowledge before scaling.

Shah added that trust assumption trade-offs are unresolved, as some institutions may prefer centralization in certain layers. "Our goal as any blockchain service provider is how are you reducing the trust assumptions," she said, "because that is what institutions need."

Conclusion

The webinar surfaced a clear divide in how infrastructure providers compete for institutional tokenization: Stacks is building a Bitcoin-native collateral layer targeting 100,000 BTC staked across DeFi, Monad is betting that EVM performance with built-in secondary market liquidity will win asset issuers, and Canton is pursuing privacy-first rails already processing trillions monthly for the world's largest financial institutions. Across all three, the message was the same: tokenization is the starting point, not the finish line.

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