CZ Wants Countries to Tokenize Assets, But There’s A Catch

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said tokenization could help countries raise money and attract foreign investment, while acknowledging that putting assets on multiple blockchains could fragment liquidity. 

His comments come as the tokenization market continues to expand, with the total value of distributed assets now at $38.40 billion.

CZ Pushes For Global Tokenization 

Zhao framed tokenization as a funding tool for states. In a Thursday post, he named foreign direct investment (FDI) as one benefit, asking which country or company would not want to sell tokenized stocks globally.

“Tokenization is one of the best ways for countries to ‘raise money,’ or attract FDI (Foreign Direct Investment),” he said.

Zhao advises Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan on digital asset policy. He made a similar pitch to governments in June.

The market he describes keeps expanding. Distributed asset value across tokenized real-world assets reached $38.40 billion, up 2.16% in 30 days, according to RWA.xyz.

Holders grew far faster than value. The count rose 79.74% to 2,379,918. However, the represented asset value declined 4.66% to $342.63 billion.

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The Fragmentation Problem

CZ said he supports tokenization across all blockchains. He also added that a multi-chain approach can fragment liquidity. 

Financial market infrastructure firms have already flagged the risk of fragmentation. Clearstream, DTCC, and Euroclear released a joint paper with Boston Consulting Group.

They warned that fragmentation across distributed ledger networks leaves assets trapped in isolated pools and raises operating costs.

Still, Zhao argued that having multiple players build the market could accelerate the sector’s growth. He said greater interoperability between issuers could eventually help address the liquidity problem.

“Fragmentation can be somewhat addressed if there is high interchangeability amongst different issuers, which is important,” he wrote.

Zhao is not the only executive making the argument for tokenization. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev called it the best path to modernizing US finance this week.

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