The Rise of Tokenization: How Financial Institutions are Adapting to a New Era

Welcome to FinTech TV.

In a global market that never sleeps, the idea of waiting days for your dollars to settle feels like a relic of the past.

While Kraken recently became the first digital asset firm to secure direct access to the Federal Reserve's payment network, at the same time they are rolling out instant 365 day dollar withdrawals and plugging their OTC liquidity directly into ICE chat.

Well joining me here at Digital Asset Summit 2026 in New York City is Gurpreet Oberoi, Head of Institutional at Kraken.

Great to have you here.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

Well, Digital Asset Summit 2026 is well underway here in New York City, and 2026 has been quite the year so far.

So give us your take on institutional adoption and what we're actually seeing on the ground.

We're seeing every institution in the past five years.

It was an exploratory sandbox, nice to have.

Now every institution, whether it's asset managers.

Global banks in Europe, US, Middle East, Asia, everybody's having a digital asset strategy, and they're looking at their rails and how to use blockchain to, to expedite each of the frameworks, how to actually operate their business.

Yeah, and of course, when we're looking at digital assets as an asset cloud itself, where do you think we are?

What do you think institutions are thinking when it comes to crypto?

They look at crypto as a multifold.

They look at it as a, any asset that has a large capital markets, large options, large derivatives.

It's like, like any commodity.

It's, it's a part of your portfolio.

So, traditional financial institutions are seeing the digital asset firms take a lot of their clients.

If you look at what the largest revenue generator for banks today is wealth management, and when a lot of your, a lot of their wealth clients park their assets in digital assets.

They're taking money off their platform.

So every asset manager, bank, it has to have their own digital asset strategy where they can offer the same products.

And so we're seeing that shift happening in real time, whether it's Morgan Stanley launching their own ETFs for Ethereum and Bitcoin, uh, you're seeing that across each of the banks having a, having a way to offer their clients explosure digital assets.

So that's one.

Second is using the rails for stablecoins across your or across payments internally and externally.

So they're exploring how to use instance settlements, which stablecoins allow versus a traditional system.

Yeah, and while we're talking about trends and institutional adoption, I do want to ask you about tokenization.

So do you think 2026 is the year that the, not just the narrative itself, but tokenization actually becomes a reality and why?

So tokenization is multifold.

So tokenizations, we look at, I look at 2026 as the, as what, like maybe 2019, 2020 was for stablecoins.

Like nobody knew what stablecoins were.

Like, why would you need a digital dollar when you can have the real dollar, right?

And now it's a $300 billion plus asset class.

We're seeing the same thing for tokenization right now where traditional firms will look at, to look at digital asset firms as distribution partners.

So what that means if you're an Apollo, you're, you know, you're Carlisle, you're Fortress, etc. you, you can build products where you can distribute to the stable coin holders that own $300 billion right?

So, tokensization allows for liquidity instance settlements across.

Right now, stablecoins, but with, with other financial products like bonds, credit, private stocks.

So you're seeing institutions seeing this trend happening, and they want to make sure they can also earn fees and, and put their own products and their own funds on chain.

Yeah, and I'm sure that you've been having plenty of conversations with stakeholders.

And when we take a step back and look at Q1 2026, as well as what has changed in the digital asset landscape in the past year as well, how has the conversation changed compared to the beginning of, say, last year to where we are now?

It's more of a partnership approach.

I think 2025 it was very, maybe we can do it ourselves, explore it.

Now 2026 is, we have to have this roadmap in.

We spent a lot of time and a lot of money, and now our board is saying to implement it immediately.

So I think the long time frames are not going to be sufficient anymore for these large firms, and they'll need to figure out how to partner and build fast.

Yeah, and when we think about an event such as Digital Asset Summit 2026, we know that there are plenty of announcements, but you have also had a lot of announcements in the past quarter as well as last year.

So what does the next 12 months look like?

It's just growing.

Right?

And I think, you know, across each of our articles, um, our qualified custody or staking or tokenization business, as a firm, we're just in rapid growth mode.

And we want to make sure that, and we're a global firm, to make sure that we can service our clients, offer new products that allow our clients to, you know, service and make, you know, They offer keep offering newer financial products, which trashed by firms offer.

We launch tokenized equities, you'll see tokenized metals, you'll see us, you know, going deeper in tokenization across the stack.

And finally, before I let you go, obviously Kraken has clients all around the globe.

So when it comes to innovation and trends, what are you watching?

I think tokenization is, is a key theme for 2026.

It's basically what was an idea.

Now it's becoming reality.

And what we'll see is, as, as more and more, as more and more products get tokenized, the liquidity providers like the market making firms, etc. as they come in, you'll see the space evolve in a very fast manner.

Well, Gurpreet, it was great talking to you here at DAS.

Thank you so much for your time and thank you for your perspective.

Thanks for having me.