1/ The lines between asset classes are blurring.
Stocks vs. bonds… public vs. private… these distinctions are not laws of nature.
They were created by 20th-century plumbing and regulation, not economic necessity.
🧵👇🏼
2/ Take stocks vs. bonds.
Stocks react constantly to new information, so we built centralized, high-speed exchanges with continuous trading, real-time price feeds, and heavy disclosure to protect retail investors.
3/ Bonds evolved differently.
Each issue is slightly unique. Most buyers were institutions. Trading stayed OTC: negotiated, opaque, slower. The sophisticated buyer base meant less regulatory attention.
4/ So the stock/bond distinction is as much historical market structure as actual economics.
In a tokenized world where all assets share global rails, those silos stop making sense.
5/ Market structure has already started to shift.
Coinbase is pushing to become the “everything exchange.”
Robinhood bundled stocks, crypto & options into one UX.
6/ Even TradFi is moving.
NYSE parent ICE is expanding into digital/retail. It just committed $2B to Polymarket.
Reuters: exchanges are “expanding beyond traditional trading platforms” to diversify.
7/ Why?
Because customers want to express views on anything - equities, rates, elections, sports - from a single balance sheet + seamless UI.
8/ Today’s platforms solve this with UI abstraction: wrapping messy, siloed market structures into one experience.
It works - but only highlights how outdated the plumbing is.
9/ Tokenization is the real unlock.
The future of finance will be asset-agnostic.
On unified rails, what matters is risk and liquidity.
10/ Value will migrate away from gatekeepers of old venue/settlement cycles toward those who can structure, manage & instantly move tokenized risk.
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