Citrini: Wall Street's Tokenization Party Has Guests More Interesting Than $BTC and $ETH 🎩

The firms and protocols that collect fees from tokenized stocks, bonds and loans stand to benefit more from Wall Street's blockchain push than bitcoin or ether themselves, according to a 79-page report from Citrini Research titled "Breaking the Wall," published Thursday. The research firm argued that moving traditional financial assets onto blockchains could create new businesses in trading, lending and payments, with the biggest winners being platforms and companies that monetize that activity rather than the major cryptocurrencies. "We can't assume that majors, primarily BTC and ETH, will make new ATHs on this," the report said, referring to all-time highs. "Even if they do, there are better expressions."

Tokenization converts traditional assets such as stocks, bonds and loans into digital tokens that can move between financial platforms and potentially trade around the clock. A tokenized stock, for example, could serve as collateral for a loan directly from an investor's digital wallet, without going through a traditional brokerage, opening new markets for trading platforms, lenders, stablecoin issuers and companies that handle securities ownership records.

Citrini outlined two investment baskets to identify opportunities, one focused on publicly traded stocks and another on crypto tokens. In equities, the firm highlighted Securitize, Coinbase, Robinhood, Circle, Figure, SoFi and Bullish as potential beneficiaries of financial assets moving onto blockchains. The report also named Aerodrome, Maple, Ondo, Pendle and Derive among the crypto tokens seen as positioned to capture fee-generating activity, while cautioning that growing blockchain activity does not always translate into higher token prices.

The report, dated Oct. 8, 2026, comes from a research firm best known for its work on technology and markets, including artificial intelligence, and for running the most-followed Substack newsletter, with more than 263,000 followers. Citrini's earlier research on AI went viral earlier this year, sparking widespread fear and contributing to a brief market meltdown.

At the time of publication, bitcoin (BTC) was trading at $81,817.52 and ether (ETH) at $2,474.85, according to the report's cited figures, underscoring the gap between the largest cryptocurrencies and the narrower set of companies and protocols Citrini identified as the most direct ways to express a tokenization thesis.