Tokenisation After the Hype Cycle: Enterprise Use Cases That Survive Due Diligence

Tokenisation has crossed from pilot into production, and it has done so in a much narrower band than its advocates predicted. Treasuries, credit and funds. Almost nothing else at scale. That concentration is not an accident of timing and it is worth understanding, because it is a specification.

What treasuries have that other assets do not

Unambiguous ownership. Standardised terms. Established dispute resolution. A value that does not depend on anyone's continuing performance. Tokenising an instrument with those four properties is a plumbing exercise, and plumbing exercises are what institutional capital funds first.

Run the same test against a media right, a private company share, or a piece of infrastructure. Ownership is layered. Terms are bespoke to each deal. Territory matters. Value depends on continued exploitation. Every position needs individual diligence — which is exactly the cost structure institutional capital exists to avoid.

The enterprise test, stated plainly

An asset is a credible tokenisation candidate when: ownership can be established without a bilateral investigation; terms can be expressed in a standard form; a dispute has a resolution path a counsel's office recognises; and settlement finality means something legally, not just technically.

Most proposals we assess fail on the second and third. They are technically competent and commercially premature, because the standardisation they assume does not exist yet.

Where that leaves the opportunity

The gap is the opportunity, but not in the way most decks argue it. The valuable thing to build is not another asset class on-chain — it is the standardisation layer that makes diligence repeatable. Whoever builds that determines which assets the institutional wave reaches next.

It is unglamorous, it requires equal fluency in law and protocol design, and it only pays once widely adopted. That combination is hostile to how most companies in this sector get funded, which is roughly why it remains unbuilt.