Ophelia Snyder, co‑founder of 21Shares, announced on CoinDesk’s Public Keys alongside Jennifer Sanasie that the finance sector is overstating its readiness to adopt tokenization at an institutional scale.
Tokenization Benefits and Limits
Snyder highlighted that blockchain‑based tokenization can streamline settlement infrastructure and speed up asset transfers, delivering measurable efficiency gains for market participants. She added that these operational improvements represent only a modest portion of the overall challenge facing investors and institutions.
Barriers to Institutional Adoption
The primary obstacle, according to Snyder, lies in merging blockchain‑enabled assets with the existing technology stack that financial firms rely on daily, including record‑keeping, compliance, and regulatory reporting tools. A large share of these platforms are supplied by third‑party vendors, many of which have yet to retrofit their solutions for crypto‑compatible transaction processing. Snyder also warned that industry dialogues often ignore the critical interval between trade execution and final settlement, a phase that demands extensive operational coordination.