Digital Asset co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz described tokenization’s next phase as the connection of markets through coordinated financial infrastructure, rather than asset issuance alone.
The remarks came June 19 at the 2026 Next Global Digital Asset Summit in Seoul, where Rooz delivered a presentation titled “From Fragmented Markets to Coordinated Financial Infrastructure.”
Digital Asset was founded in 2014 on the hypothesis that the world’s financial assets would eventually move onchain. The company later concluded that white papers or token issuance alone could not change the global financial system. Since 2016, its work has focused on institutional requirements including privacy, asset-specific access controls, and network governance.
The presentation framed today’s market structure around the separation of assets, cash, and collateral across different systems. Settling bonds against cash, for example, requires several intermediaries to align assets, creating significant time and cost burdens. Those frictions were described as costing banks, exchanges, and market participants more than $100 billion annually.
Existing blockchain models were also presented as limited. Public chains are too permissionless for regulated markets, while closed networks can create new silos for assets and liquidity. A single ledger for all markets was described as unrealistic because countries operate under different foreign exchange rules, privacy standards, and financial regulations.
Canton was described as a “network of networks” that allows countries and institutions to maintain their own rules, sovereignty, and privacy while connecting when needed. One example given was a Korean Canton applying Korean regulations and a U.S. Canton applying U.S. regulations, with interoperability preserved between the two.
The presentation identified privacy, composability, and aligned economic incentives as three core elements of institutional blockchain infrastructure.
Canton is already in real use, according to the presentation, processing roughly $9 trillion to $10 trillion in onchain asset value per month and generating about $2 million to $3 million in network fees per day. The figures were attributed to institutional financial infrastructure usage rather than speculative trading.
For Korea, the key opportunities identified were won-denominated money market funds, deposit tokens, and cross-border clearing. Deposit tokens were described as a potential cash bridge for onchain asset transactions. In that structure, tokenized securities and collateral assets could work together with bank-issued won-linked deposit tokens for asset trading, settlement, and liquidity management.
The presentation also described Korea as increasingly attractive to global investors because of geopolitical changes and growth in manufacturing, defense, and artificial intelligence, while overseas access to Korean assets remains inefficient. The lack of real-time settlement for Korean government bonds was cited as one example.
Blockchain’s utility was framed not as eliminating existing financial institutions, but as improving their operational efficiency so they can provide better products and services to investors.
The closing message was that tokenization’s next phase is not individual projects or asset issuance, but coordinated markets.
