Tokenisation is one of those words that gets used a lot and explained rarely. The plain version is this. A real-world asset — a US Treasury, an Apple share, a barrel of oil, a slice of private credit — gets represented as a token that lives on-chain. Once it is a token, it can be held in a wallet, moved, and traded the same way any other on-chain asset is. It trades around the clock, it settles on-chain, and it sits next to your stablecoins instead of in a separate brokerage account.
That is genuinely new. You can hold tokenised exposure to a public company, a government bond, and a commodity in the same place, and move between them without going through three different intermediaries. Some platforms are already letting users trade things like tokenised Apple, or get exposure to high-profile private names, 24 hours a day from a single prompt.
The catch shows up the moment you try to build it.
The fragmentation problem
Tokenised assets are not one market. They are dozens of separate ones.
Equities come from one set of issuers. Treasuries from another. Commodities, ETFs, and private credit each have their own venues, their own contracts, their own ways of being minted, redeemed, and priced. If you want to offer your users a tokenised stock and a tokenised T-bill, you are not doing one integration. You are doing two, on different rails, with different mechanics, and you are maintaining both.
This is the same problem on-chain yield had a few years ago, just earlier in its life. Lots of venues, no common surface, every new one a fresh engineering project. For a fintech that wants to offer tokenised assets as a feature rather than a full-time engineering commitment, integrating each issuer one by one does not scale.
What a unified RWA layer is
The fix is to put all of it behind one interface. A single API where a tokenised equity, a tokenised treasury, and tokenised credit are reachable the same way, so embedding a tokenised stock is no harder than embedding a yield product. The aggregation, the differences between issuers, the mechanics of each venue — that all sits below the surface. You ask for the asset, you get back a ready-to-sign transaction.
Today that already covers hundreds of tokenised markets, including 438 live tokenised US equities at real-time prices, alongside ETFs and commodities. And it stays non-custodial like everything else. We prepare the transaction, your user's signer authorises it, the asset never moves through us. A user buying tokenised exposure to a company holds it in their own wallet, the same way they hold anything else.
Why this matters more than it sounds
When a Treasury, a stock, a commodity, and a stablecoin yield position all live as tokens in the same wallet, the categories start to stop mattering to the user. They do not think "this is an equity and that is a bond." They see assets, a balance, and the ability to move between them. The lines between asset classes blur. The line between public and private markets blurs next, because the same rails that tokenise a stock can tokenise a fund.
For the user that means access to things that used to require the right account, the right minimum, or the right phone call. For a platform it means the menu of what you can offer your users gets much wider without the integration cost scaling with it. One endpoint, many asset types, the same simple "ask for it and sign" model underneath.
Enterprise demand is starting to concentrate here. Not on any single tokenised asset, but on a layer that makes all of them reachable at once. That is the part of this that is still being built, and it is the part worth building.
If you are thinking about embedding tokenised assets and want to talk through what is actually live, email us at contact@compasslabs.ai or browse the tokenised-assets product.
Compass does not control DeFi protocols or smart contracts. Using DeFi protocols involves risk, including potential loss of funds. This is not investment advice.