Tokenization Begins Tomorrow

I've been writing to you all year saying tokenization is coming.

Tomorrow, it officially begins.

Look at the DTCC website.

A quick refresher: the DTCC handles the holding and settlement of every stock and fixed income security in the U.S. market. Every stock and ETF you own through your broker is held at the DTCC. Every trade you place goes through it.

When you hear "DTCC," think of the single most important company in the world. Without it, U.S. markets would grind to a halt and everything would break.

They hold over $100 trillion in assets and process somewhere in the realm of $3 quadrillion a year in transactions.

And beginning tomorrow, they have SEC authorization to take those assets and those transactions and tokenize them.

The stocks you own could be converted from traditional records to tokenized ones.

If you're a regular investor, it will look no different. Same product, same investments, same broker. But behind the scenes, it's the largest shift in how markets work in decades.

I just got off the phone with the founder of a fixed income fund managing $30B. He's been on Wall Street since the late 1960s and one of the first managers in the world to run an ETF strategy in fixed income. He was there when paper settlement gave way to electronic records. He told me tokenization will be the biggest shift in market structure he has seen in his entire career.

The thing is that most people won't notice any of it. Their brokerage account and their money may look the same for another decade.

But underneath, an entire set of companies has to build the technology that makes this shift possible: back office automation, custody, compliance, settlement infrastructure.

One of them raised over $300M last week from the largest investment funds in the world. I spoke to the founder last week, and the round was oversubscribed to the point that funds were turned away. There will be countless others.

And this matters enough that it's now a question of U.S. national security. The Trump administration has said tokenization will strengthen the supremacy of the dollar, lower interest rates, and bring a whole new set of buyers to U.S. treasuries. Chris Perkins, who runs Franklin Templeton's crypto arm, told me this morning that he sees the technology as a key defense strategy for America.

Most of this is happening behind closed doors. Which is why I doubt you're hearing much about it.

Tokenization is about to become the way things work and by the time they're obvious enough, the companies that mattered already made their investors rich.

Tomorrow, nothing will look different. That's exactly the point. Tomorrow is simply the day this stops being a fancy story I'm telling you and starts being how modern finance works.

Watch the DTCC.

I'll keep telling you where it goes from here.

In the meantime, I'm about to go for a kayak. I recently moved to the north of New Zealand and I'm amazed at just how good the climate is here. We're now in the thick of winter and while the south is covered in snow, winter here feels like a cool summer's day.

I'm even out on the deck in my shorts and t-shirt writing this right now.

Being away from America creates this great balance of lifestyle with the markets because when I get to my desk in the morning, the U.S. markets are closing.

Which is why my friend Grant Hawkridge in Australia has also designed his trading around his lifestyle. He sets his orders on Monday, then goes to play golf and whatever else an Aussie gets up to, and in the process he manages to find some killer trades.

So I want to let you know about his live event he's hosting tomorrow at 6pm ET.

He's going to demonstrate how he personally finds great trades while spending a tiny amount of time behind his screen. If that resonates with you, you can sign up to his event by clicking here.

I'll be watching, provided I don't decide on jumping in the ocean that morning.

Cheers!