Your Business Is a Real-World Asset. The Future of Capital Formation May Look Very Different.

For generations, business owners have faced a familiar set of choices when they need capital to grow.

Borrow money.

Sell a meaningful piece of the company to outside investors.

Or, for the relatively few businesses that reach sufficient scale, pursue an initial public offering.

Each path has its place. Each has helped build extraordinary companies.

But each also comes with tradeoffs.

Debt introduces repayment obligations, covenants, collateral requirements, and sometimes personal guarantees.

Private equity can provide substantial capital and expertise, but often requires significant ownership, influence over the business, and an eventual exit.

An IPO can open access to public investors, but it brings considerable expense, disclosure requirements, and the ongoing responsibilities of being a public company.

What about the established business that falls somewhere in between?

A company with real customers, meaningful revenue, valuable assets, and a compelling opportunity to grow, but without the desire to take on more debt, surrender control, or pursue a traditional public listing?

I believe an important new alternative is emerging.

Tokenization is creating the possibility of connecting real businesses and real economic assets to a broader, digitally enabled capital market.

And while much of the conversation has centered on cryptocurrency, the more consequential opportunity may be the financing of productive businesses in the real economy.

What does it mean to tokenize a business?

Let's separate the technology from the economics.

Tokenization is the process of representing ownership interests, financial claims, or other rights through digital tokens recorded on programmable infrastructure, often a blockchain.

In the context of capital formation, a company might issue securities that represent equity, debt, or another legally defined economic interest.

Those securities can potentially be represented and administered through tokenized infrastructure.

The important distinction is that investors are not simply buying a digital token.

They are buying whatever enforceable rights the underlying legal instrument provides.

Those rights might include an ownership interest, a claim on specified cash flows, or repayment obligations, depending on the offering structure.

The token is the representation and transaction mechanism.

The real value comes from the business and the rights attached to the investment.

That distinction is fundamental.

An established operating company is an economic asset. Its underlying business activities and financial performance may support a variety of investment structures.

Tokenization does not magically convert that entire business into a liquid asset. It can, however, provide a different infrastructure for issuing and managing securities backed by interests in that business.

This is where the concept of real-world assets, or RWAs, becomes relevant.

This is becoming mainstream financial infrastructure

The institutional momentum behind tokenization is difficult to ignore.

McKinsey's research, From Ripples to Waves: The Transformational Power of Tokenizing Assets, estimates that tokenized financial assets could reach approximately $2 trillion by 2030 in its base case, excluding cryptocurrencies and stablecoins.

Its bullish scenario reaches approximately $4 trillion.

Those figures are forecasts, not guarantees, and much of the expected growth initially involves established financial assets rather than operating-company equity.

But they illustrate the scale of the transformation being considered.

The Bank for International Settlements, an institution that works closely with central banks, has also examined tokenization as part of the next generation of financial infrastructure.

In its 2025 Annual Economic Report, the BIS describes tokenization as enabling:

That may sound technical.

But the implications are substantial.

Today, securities issuance, ownership records, transfers, payments, and settlement can involve multiple institutions, systems, and reconciliation processes.

Tokenized infrastructure creates opportunities to connect some of these activities more directly, subject to the legal, operational, and regulatory requirements of the market.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, a foundational institution in U.S. securities markets, is also advancing tokenization initiatives.

In December 2025, DTCC announced that its subsidiary, The Depository Trust Company, had received SEC staff no-action relief to offer a defined tokenization service for eligible securities.

Frank La Salla, DTCC's President and CEO, described potential benefits including:

These developments do not mean that every privately held business can suddenly issue tokens and trade them freely.

They do mean that tokenization is moving beyond experiments toward regulated market infrastructure.

The conversation is shifting from whether financial assets can be tokenized to how tokenized markets can operate at scale.

The customer as investor

There is another dimension of this opportunity that I find particularly interesting.

Businesses spend years building relationships with customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, and communities.

Those relationships are often among their most valuable assets.

Traditionally, however, the people who know a business best are not necessarily able to participate financially in its growth.

Consider the boutique fitness franchisor I mentioned earlier.

Boutique fitness studios are inherently community-based businesses.

They exist within neighborhoods, but over time, something more interesting happens. Members become a community themselves.

They develop relationships with instructors, staff, and fellow members. They establish routines, build friendships, and develop an emotional connection to the studio.

For many, it becomes much more than a place to exercise.

Now imagine giving that community an opportunity to become investors in the business they already support.

Through an appropriately structured securities offering, eligible members could potentially participate financially in the growth of the brand.

The studio is no longer simply a place where they spend money.

It is a business in whose success they have a vested interest.

And this creates the potential for a powerful flywheel.

Members who believe in the business may become even stronger advocates. They invite friends, introduce new members, participate in additional classes and services, and help strengthen the community that attracted them in the first place.

The company grows. The community expands. And the opportunity for additional locations becomes more compelling.

There may also be opportunities to design new forms of member engagement and rewards, including referral incentives, loyalty benefits, or recognition for participation in the studio's offerings.

These programs would need to be designed carefully, particularly where securities ownership, investment promotion, and compensation for referrals intersect with financial regulations.

But the broader opportunity is fascinating.

A business's most loyal customers could also become part of its investor community, creating a reinforcing relationship between engagement, advocacy, growth, and ownership.

This is not simply a new way to raise money.

It is a different way to think about the relationship between a business and the community that supports it.

And for a franchisor seeking to expand nationally or internationally, an existing network of passionate members could represent a meaningful potential investor audience.

Of course, customer enthusiasm does not guarantee investment demand, and ownership does not guarantee returns. The economics of the business and the terms of the investment must stand on their own.

But the possibility of aligning customers, investors, and the long-term success of a business should not be overlooked.

I have spent much of my career thinking about how businesses create value through relationships, ecosystems, and networks.

This is one reason I find the tokenization opportunity compelling.

Capital formation could become more connected to the communities and networks that help businesses create value in the first place.

That does not replace institutional investment. It introduces another potential source of participation.

Liquidity is a possibility, not a promise

We need to be careful with one of the most common claims surrounding tokenization.

Liquidity.

The ability to represent a security digitally does not guarantee that someone will want to buy it.

A tokenized share in a small private company may still be difficult to sell.

Secondary trading may be subject to securities laws, platform availability, transfer restrictions, investor eligibility requirements, and market demand.

A technically transferable token is not the same thing as a liquid investment.

This is a critical distinction for business owners and investors.

Tokenization can potentially reduce certain frictions associated with ownership records and transfers.

But it cannot manufacture demand for an unattractive investment.

Nor can it eliminate the underlying economic risks.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce made the point succinctly in a July 2025 statement:

That is exactly the right framing.

The technology may evolve.

The fundamental responsibilities associated with issuing and investing in securities remain.

And that is a good thing.

If tokenization is going to become a credible alternative for established businesses, it must be grounded in investor protection, transparent disclosures, sound economics, and enforceable rights.

The opportunity for the next generation of business growth

I do not believe traditional capital markets are going away.

Banks will continue to lend.

Private equity will continue to finance acquisitions and growth.

Venture capital will continue to fund high-risk innovation.

And public stock exchanges will remain essential to global capital formation.

But I do believe the menu of options available to business owners is going to expand.

The financial system is undergoing a transition toward more digital, programmable, and potentially accessible forms of ownership and capital formation.

The regulatory framework is evolving.

Major financial institutions are investing in the infrastructure.

And established businesses have real capital needs that are not always well served by traditional financing models.

These developments create an opportunity to rethink how capital reaches productive businesses.

Not every business will be ready.

Not every offering will succeed.

And tokenization alone will not resolve the difficult work of valuation, investor trust, or capital allocation.

But the direction is becoming clearer.

The next generation of capital markets may allow more businesses to finance growth on terms that better reflect their economics, ownership objectives, and long-term ambitions.

For business owners, the question is no longer simply whether to borrow, sell equity privately, or pursue an IPO.

It is whether a new generation of regulated, digitally enabled capital formation can offer a better alternative.

And for companies with real value to build upon, that is a conversation worth having now.

The future of tokenization is not about creating more tokens. It is about creating more ways for real businesses to access the capital they need to grow.