The Citi tokenized securities forecast puts a striking number on a trend Wall Street has been circling for years: traditional assets moving onto blockchain rails. Citi says the market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, up from about $17 billion today, as tokenized Treasury bills, digital stocks, and stablecoin settlement gather momentum.
That projection lands at a moment when tokenization is moving from crypto-native experimentation toward mainstream financial infrastructure. Instead of treating blockchain as a separate market, Citi’s view frames it as a new distribution and settlement layer for familiar products such as Treasury bills, funds, and public equities.
The scale of the jump is what makes the forecast hard to ignore. Citi’s base case sees the market reaching $5.5 trillion by 2030, with a lower estimate of $2.7 trillion and a higher case of $8.2 trillion, depending on how quickly adoption takes hold.
Citi’s 2030 tokenized securities forecast
Citi says the tokenized securities market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, a sharp rise from the current market of roughly $17 billion. The bank’s projection covers securities and real-world assets that can move on-chain, showing how far institutional finance now sees tokenization extending beyond niche pilots.
The forecast is not a single all-or-nothing bet. Citi laid out a range that depends on adoption speed:
- Low case: $2.7 trillion by 2030
- Base case: $5.5 trillion by 2030
- High case: $8.2 trillion by 2030
That range matters because it shows Citi is tying growth to real-world uptake, not treating tokenization as inevitable on a fixed timeline. In practice, the Citi tokenized securities forecast suggests blockchain is being evaluated less as a speculative technology and more as market plumbing. For banks, asset managers, and investors, that changes the conversation from whether tokenization is real to which assets move first and what infrastructure is needed to support them.
Which assets Citi expects to lead
Citi expects tokenized Treasury bills and digital stocks to do much of the heavy lifting.
The bank sees 10% of the U.S. Treasury bill market becoming tokenized by 2030. It also expects 3% of the U.S. public stock market to move into tokenized form. Those are not fringe categories. They are among the deepest and most systemically important pools of capital in finance.
Tokenized Treasury bills stand out because they sit at the intersection of crypto demand and traditional fixed-income markets. Citi says stablecoin growth may create about $1 trillion in new demand for U.S. Treasuries, linking the rise of digital dollars directly to the tokenization story.
Digital stocks are the other big pillar. Citi says a shift by everyday U.S. investors toward digital trading platforms may create $2.6 trillion in demand for digital stocks. That points to a version of tokenization that is not just about back-end efficiency, but also about how investors access markets.
Why tokenized Treasury bills and stocks matter first
Treasury bills are relatively straightforward, yield-bearing, and already central to reserve management. That makes them a natural bridge asset for institutional adoption.
Stocks, by contrast, point to something broader: trading, ownership, and market access moving into an on-chain framework. If even a modest share of public equities becomes tokenized, it would signal that tokenization is no longer confined to cash management products or experimental funds.
That is another reason the Citi tokenized securities forecast is drawing attention. It is anchored in asset classes investors already know, rather than hypothetical products that may never gain traction.
Why stablecoin settlement matters
Stablecoins sit near the center of Citi’s model because they act as the digital cash layer for tokenized assets. In practical terms, they can help settle trades faster than many legacy systems and make it easier to move between cash and on-chain securities.
That settlement function is one of the clearest reasons tokenization keeps drawing institutional interest. A tokenized Treasury or digital stock becomes more useful when investors also have a blockchain-native way to pay, settle, and rebalance positions without waiting for traditional market hours.
Citi also connects this shift to always-on finance. In an earlier Citi discussion, Ryan Rugg, global head of digital assets for Treasury and Trade Solutions at Citi, said, “Tokenization is reshaping financial services.”
Still, the bullish case depends on more than fast rails. Citi says the model needs strong compliance, custody, and market structure. Tokenized securities must link to legal ownership records, not simply track the price of traditional assets. That is a key distinction because real institutional adoption depends on enforceable rights and functioning market infrastructure, not just token wrappers.
The wider market backdrop for real-world asset tokenization
The broader backdrop helps explain why the Citi tokenized securities forecast carries weight. Wall Street has been steadily building out its tokenization thesis, with banks and asset managers increasingly treating blockchain rails as a way to improve settlement, expand trading hours, and widen access to financial products.
Ethereum is noted as hosting a large share of the tokenized real-world asset market. That matters because it shows where much of the current activity is already clustering, especially for tokenized Treasuries and institutionally oriented products.
Standard Chartered has also projected that tokenized assets could reach $4 trillion by the end of 2028, split between stablecoins and real-world assets. Citi’s outlook stretches further, to 2030, and puts tokenized securities more squarely at the center of Wall Street’s on-chain push.
The strategic takeaway is simple: if Treasury bills, public stocks, and stablecoin settlement become the early winners, tokenization may advance not through a dramatic break from traditional finance, but through a steady migration of core markets onto blockchain infrastructure. That would make the next phase of crypto adoption look a lot less like disruption from the outside and a lot more like finance quietly rewiring itself underneath.