The line between traditional finance (TradFi) and crypto is blurring, 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, predicts Wall Street will run entirely on blockchain technology by 2030. Mata told CoinDesk that tech industry buzzwords like “Web3” are fading as big banks adopt the technology for standard financial plumbing, such as settlements and payments.
“The fusion between Wall Street and technology will disappear,” Mata said in an interview. “We’re not going to talk about blockchain anymore. It’s merging into fintech.”
While institutional interest in real-world asset tokenization is growing, fueled by major initiatives 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 agreement targets the company’s shareholder registration to ensure that shares are issued and registered 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. Bricken, a Barcelona, Spain-based tokenization platform that has served as a pathway to bring $500 million of real-world assets on-chain, is currently integrating AI agents to automate asset onboarding and liquidity sourcing for its 200 customers. .
Mata predicts that traditional software dashboards will soon be replaced by simple chat prompts, with AI agents handling the backend work of finding the best financial returns.
“The decision maker is not going to be us anymore. It is going to be AI,” Mata said.
Mata also criticized the EU’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, creating a moat for the bigger players,” Mata said. “It might take you nine months [to get a license]and if you’re a startup, nine months without making money, you’re dead.”
Startups may choose to move to the UAE and Southeast Asia rather than tackle these steep barriers. Mata believes that the US will remain the main powerhouse of crypto innovation simply because it controls the world’s largest capital market, making current regulatory disputes in Washington temporary noise.
French-based Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet shared Mata’s criticism. He told CoinDesk that the EU’s regulatory framework has transformed the competitive landscape of Web3, inadvertently impacting crypto startups and instead greatly benefiting legacy financial institutions
Read more: Abra’s Bill Barhydt says Wall Street’s next crypto bet is tokenization
