$Ondo & Black Rock' Fink ($13T in assets managed)
"Tokenization could be bigger than AI." ~Larry Fink
What Larry Fink said the other day is not some throwaway line about “tokenization being the future.” It’s one of those rare moments where a major institutional figure says the quiet part out loud.
Fink doesn’t make public comparisons lightly. When he claims tokenization may have a greater long-term impact than AI, he’s not speaking as a futurist — he’s speaking as the CEO of the largest asset manager on earth, a firm already deeply invested in building the rails that tokenization will sit on.
This is the same pattern we’ve seen from him for two decades: he telegraphs the direction after BlackRock is already structurally committed to it. AI, ETFs, ESG — none of these were predictions. They were announcements of where global capital was already rotating. Tokenization is now being elevated into that same category.
And this is where the real significance starts. Fink isn’t talking about speculation, or NFTs, or anything remotely resembling what retail thinks “crypto” is.
He’s talking about an architectural change to the financial system — the replacement of the underlying ledger that moves collateral, payments, and settlement across the world.
Banks can’t operate in transparent public environments, regulators can’t supervise opaque private ones, and until recently there was no bridge between the two. The work happening behind the scenes — at BlackRock, JPMorgan, Citi, UBS, HSBC, Franklin Templeton — has been about solving that exact gap.
MAS’ Project Guardian is the largest coordinated effort in the world aimed at building compliant, programmable, cross-chain settlement rails for tokenized assets.
That ecosystem isn’t theoretical anymore. It is live pilots, regulatory sandboxes, sovereign institutions, and the biggest banks on earth testing interoperability. And sitting adjacent to that entire movement — not competing with it, but enabling it — is ONDO.
This is the part CT never understands.
ONDO is not a speculative side bet on “RWAs.” It’s one of the few entities that can actually serve as a neutral, compliant asset issuer on public chains without being a bank, without carrying balance sheet risk, and without violating custody laws.
BlackRock can tokenize treasuries, but they cannot issue instruments that behave like stable assets on open networks.
JPM can run private chains, but they cannot bridge regulated collateral onto public settlement layers. Regulators will not allow banks to custody public-chain assets outside of extremely narrow frameworks. So who fills the gap?
Someone who isn’t a bank, is compliant, can issue tokenized yield-bearing instruments, and already plugs into public and private chains. That’s why ONDO exists, and why it will be looped into the architecture whether people recognize it today or not.
This is also why Fink’s comment matters — not because it moves price now, but because it confirms what the institutional roadmap already looks like. Tokenization is not a “narrative” anymore. It’s the direction of travel for global finance.
The ledger is changing. Settlement is changing. Collateral movement is changing. And the firms building the rails are now speaking publicly in a way they absolutely did not two years ago. The market doesn’t care yet — we’re in a liquidity-starved environment, sentiment is dead, and anything without immediate cashflow is punished.
ONDO, AXL, RWAs in general — all of it is trading as if none of this matters. And that’s exactly what these early phases always feel like: you sit through disbelief, boredom, regulatory noise, “dead money” rhetoric, and the slow bleed that convinces everyone these ideas will never scale.
But under the surface, the direction is already locked. BlackRock is not praising tokenization — they’re building the infrastructure. MAS is not experimenting — they’re standardizing. Banks are not exploring options — they’re migrating.
This is the work that doesn’t show up in price until liquidity returns and the market finally wakes up to what has been quietly constructed for years. That’s why I don’t look at Fink’s comment as hype. It’s confirmation that the rails ONDO was built for are coming.
The timing already has frustrated everyone, the path will be slow, and sentiment will stay ugly — but structurally, this is exactly the signal long-term investors should want. I got in almost 2 years ago. It's been a long road. But because I have seen this movie before. I can take the pain. I know how this story ends.
Not noise. Not hopium. Acknowledgment from the top of the pyramid that the architecture is shifting, and the firms positioned correctly will benefit whether retail sees it now or not.
This isn't price moving news but it's also NOT noise!