Almost anything could be tokenized in 5-10 years — Matrixport Co-Founder

Profitability, improved liquidity, 24/7 market access and removal of intermediaries have been the main advantages cited by the blockchain infrastructure compared to the current legacy systems.

In five to ten years, nearly every "real-world" asset class could be tokenized as a non-fungible token (NFT) according to Cynthia Wu, co-founder of the service platform of Matrixport digital assets.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Wu said the best case for NFTs would be the widespread representation of real-world assets to be stored and traded on-chain:

"Eventually, all major financial asset classes will be represented on this new financial infrastructure [and] NFTs could be our instrument to represent off-chain assets like real estate deeds, stocks or bonds."< /p>

The on-chain move would make these real-world assets “more liquid and tradable,” which would improve price discovery and transaction activity, Wu added.

But Wu said that while it's great that we've created over two trillion native digital assets on-chain from Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and other tokens, the only niche to have generated NFT transaction activity has come from digital collectibles, which hasn't really helped institutional adoption:

"We haven't really seen any off-chain assets represented on-chain [...] we're now really only in the top 3-5%."

But nevertheless, Wu is convinced that the tide will turn.

Earlier this month, a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report estimated that the total size of illiquid tokenized assets will reach $16.1 trillion by 2030.

BCG has predicted that much of this tokenization will come from pre-IPO shares, real estate, private debt, and revenue generated by small and medium-sized businesses.

However, while the tokenization of real-world assets has sparked interest from financial institutions, Wu said some are a bit reluctant...