The line between traditional finance (TradFi) and crypto is disappearing, with tokenization consistently a dominant narrative of the digital asset industry for a number of years.
Edwin Mata, CEO and founder of tokenization platform Brickken, projects that Wall Street will run entirely on blockchain technology by 2030. Mata told CoinDesk that tech industry buzzwords like “Web3” are fading as major banks adopt the technology for standard financial plumbing, such as settlements and payments.
“The merge between Wall Street and technology is going to dissipate,” Mata said in an interview. “We’re not going to talk anymore about blockchain. It’s merging into fintech.”
While institutional interest in tokenizing real-world assets is growing, driven by major moves like BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, Mata warned that Europe is over-regulating itself out of the race.
This push toward blockchain-native infrastructure was highlighted by Bullish’s (BLSH) $4.2 billion acquisition of transfer agent Equiniti. The deal targets corporate shareholder recordkeeping to ensure shares are issued and recorded directly on-chain from the start, rather than using synthetic digital “wrappers.” Bullish is also the parent company of CoinDesk.
The next shift for tokenization will not be driven by humans, but by software, Mata said. Brickken, a Barcelona, Spain-based tokenization platform that has served as a pathway for bringing $500 million of real-world assets onchain, is currently integrating AI agents to automate the onboarding of assets and the sourcing of liquidity for its 200 clients. .
Mata predicts that traditional software dashboards will soon be replaced by simple chat prompts, where AI agents handle the backend work of finding the best financial yields.
“The decision-maker is not going to be us anymore. It’s going to be AI,” Mata said.
Mata also criticized the European Union’s MiCA regulatory framework, which he said protects legacy banks by imposing expensive, slow-moving compliance rules on small startups.
“Smaller players cannot access the market, which creates a moat for the bigger players,” Mata said. “It can take you nine months [to get a license], and if you’re a startup, nine months without monetizing, you’re dead.”
Startups may choose to move to the UAE and Southeast Asia rather than tackle these steep barriers. Mata believes the U.S. will remain the main powerhouse for crypto innovation simply because it controls the world’s largest capital market, rendering current regulatory disputes in Washington temporary noise.
France-based Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet shared Mata’s criticism. He told CoinDesk the EU’s regulatory framework has transformed the competitive landscape of Web3, unintendedly affecting crypto startups, and instead hugely benefiting legacy financial institutions
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