Giselle Lai said the more appealing use case for fidelity tokenized funds is balance sheet management, not just 24/7 liquidity. Speaking at the WebX conference in Tokyo, the Fidelity International strategist argued that institutions are looking for a tool that helps move cash across accounts, currencies and rules, not just a faster wrapper.
Tokyo and the balance sheet case
“I think over time, the more appealing use case will be balance sheet management,” Lai said in an interview at the WebX conference in Tokyo. For global institutions, that points to cash held in multiple bank accounts worldwide to comply with regulatory requirements, manage currency exposure and meet demand when needed.
Those deposits often earn no return. Lai said tokenized assets may be a more efficient use case for corporations if they can use more 24/7 bearing instruments to manage their balance sheet. The practical shift is from a product pitched for trading convenience to one aimed at day-to-day treasury handling.
Fidelity and the wrapper problem
“Generally speaking, they are not asking for tokens,” Lai said of institutional investors. “They are asking for what tokens can do more compared to the existing wrappers they already have.” That matters because tokenized instruments already exist mainly for investing, with tokenized money market funds the most popular category and more than $15 billion of assets under management.
BlackRock's USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund debuted in March 2024, and the category is primarily backed by U.S. Treasuries. Broader onchain real-world assets excluding stablecoins have surpassed $31 billion in value, while the global asset tokenization market is valued at roughly $2.1 trillion and could reach $24.5 trillion by 2033, with some estimates putting it as high as $88 trillion by 2035.
20 years for tokenization
“It takes almost 20 years for [the ETF] industry to build a comprehensive ecosystem … same evolution is going to happen in the tokenization space,” Lai said. That timeline suggests the current rush around tokenized products is still early relative to the infrastructure institutions will need before these instruments can sit inside mainstream treasury workflows.
Tokenized assets can move efficiently, earn yield around the clock and integrate with broader liquidity needs, but Lai's comments put the emphasis elsewhere: the first big institutional payoff may be managing money already on the balance sheet more efficiently. Jill Maher outlines Fidelity Trading guide for hands-off investors sits alongside the same shift in how Fidelity frames investment access, but Lai's point is sharper for treasury teams: the product has to outperform existing wrappers before it becomes a standard operating tool.
The next hurdle is not whether tokenized products can trade at any hour, but how quickly they can become the kind of balance sheet tool large institutions will actually adopt. Lai's own answer was measured: the ecosystem will take years, and the companies and treasuries waiting for a cleaner way to move cash across bank accounts will have to decide whether current tokenized funds already do enough.
