Tokenised funds have stopped asking whether the technology works. We know it does. For example, Hamilton Lane’s tokenised share class for its Global Private Assets Fund, is saying something bigger: real products, from managers people actually recognise, built on infrastructure that exists today.
We’re past the proof-of-concept conversation. But getting the product launched is the easy part. The harder part, the one that actually determines who wins here, is whether these products can move from credible one-off launches into a scalable distribution model for private markets.
I believe that the next phase of fund tokenisation will be won or lost in the operating model, not the digital wrapper.
Technology alone will not drive adoption
When done well, fund tokenisation can genuinely improve things. Transparency goes up, settlement times come down, and the administrative burden that has historically kept private markets out of reach for most investors starts to look a lot more manageable. That is the real promise.
But none of that matters if the plumbing doesn’t connect. A tokenised fund sitting on its own proprietary rails, with bespoke legal structures and compliance processes built around it, is fine for a pilot. It is not fine if the ambition is to achieve scale.
That is why the market is starting to move towards more modular tokenisation platforms, such as Asseto, that bring issuance, lifecycle management, trading, settlement, and reporting into a single institutional workflow, while still allowing firms to choose the deployment model that fits their regulatory and operational requirements.
At some point, a distributor needs to verify eligibility. A transfer agent needs to reconcile ownership records. A custodian needs to support the asset. A regulator needs to access the information it needs in a familiar format. If any one of those breaks down, the product stalls, regardless of how elegant the token architecture is.
Scale depends on interoperability
For tokenised funds to become more than a specialist category, they need to meet the fund distribution market where it is: global, multi-party, highly regulated, and operationally complex.
That means connecting with the systems that already determine how funds actually work: who can hold them, how ownership is recorded, how transfers are approved, how restrictions are enforced, and how regulators verify activity.
And this goes beyond technology. Legal, operational, and governance challenges matter just as much.
Tokenised records need to sit inside existing compliance frameworks so that know-your-customer, anti-money laundering, investor eligibility, and transfer restrictions can be applied consistently. Data standards need to be clear enough that different parties can look at the same information and agree on what it says. Settlement processes need to be predictable so that institutions can actually manage their risk around them.
None of this means every institution needs to use the same network, or that innovation should be forced into closed environments. But, there’s a difference between competition and fragmentation. Right now the risk is that the industry ends up with a collection of individually credible products that are collectively very hard to adopt at scale. Common standards, clear governance, and interoperability across public and private systems will be what separates a functioning market from a patchwork of pilots that never quite manage to join up.
Institutional coordination will shape fund tokenisation
No single asset manager, regulator, platform, or blockchain network can build the connective tissue that allows tokenised funds to function on their own.
If every institution develops its own approach to interoperability, compliance, reporting, custody, and settlement, the market ends up more complex, harder to integrate and harder to oversee. That would undermine one of tokenisation’s central promises: making private markets easier to access, administer, and distribute.
So, the industry needs coordination where fragmentation creates friction: data standards, investor eligibility, transfer controls, settlement processes, custody models, reporting formats, and governance expectations. The boring stuff, in other words. But the stuff that actually determines whether any of this works in practice.
This has been done before. Traditional financial markets run on shared infrastructure, common messaging standards, recognised roles, and agreed operational processes. Fund tokenisation fits in that same logic, making parts of the system faster, more transparent, and more efficient. Nobody is trying to rebuild everything from scratch.
This means the next stage of tokenised funds is practical, not conceptual. The question of whether a fund can be tokenised has been answered. The question now is whether tokenised funds can be made usable inside the real operating model of global asset management.
The firms that figure that out, making this work for asset managers, distributors, administrators, transfer agents, custodians, investors, and regulators at scale, are the ones that will matter
