A Research Firm Calls the Tokenisation Boom, Then Asks Who Collects the Fees

Citrini Research, a thematic research firm with a following among macro and equity investors, has published a view that tokenisation is arriving in earnest, CoinDesk reported. The argument is that moving real-world assets onto blockchains, shares, funds, credit, Treasuries, gives the technology a clear job in finance rather than a speculative one. The firm's harder question, and the one it says investors should be working on, is which companies, networks and protocols actually capture the revenue that comes with it.

This is a more useful framing than it sounds, because the tokenisation trade has so far been easier to describe than to own. A bank tokenises a money market fund. A broker issues share tokens offshore. A settlement network puts a Treasury bill onchain. Each of those creates economic activity, but the fee pool splits across issuers, custodians, transfer agents, chains and the venues where the tokens trade, and no two deals split it the same way.

The layers that can charge

Roughly, there are four places a fee can stick. The issuer of the token earns on the underlying asset, which is why tokenised Treasury products have been the first profitable category: the issuer keeps part of the yield. The custodian holding the real asset charges for safekeeping. The chain collects transaction fees. And the trading venue, whether a centralised exchange or an automated market maker, takes a cut of volume.

Those four do not grow at the same rate. Issuer economics scale with assets under management and with interest rates. Venue economics scale with turnover, which for tokenised equities is still concentrated in a handful of tickers and a handful of pools. Chain fees scale with transactions, which can rise while the value of what is being transacted stays flat.

What the chain numbers show

Robinhood Chain, the Ethereum layer 2 where a large share of tokenised equity trading has settled, collected $1.9m of fees in 24 hours and $131.3m over 30 days, according to DefiLlama. Its total value locked sits at $1.05bn, flat over the week, with stablecoin supply of $1.06bn. Those are real revenues at the chain layer, and they are an order of magnitude smaller than what an issuer earns on a comparable pile of yield-bearing assets.

That asymmetry is the heart of Citrini's question. The chain is the most visible part of the stack and frequently the least lucrative part of it. The issuer is the least visible and, so far, the most lucrative. Investors trying to express a tokenisation view through infrastructure tokens are buying the thin layer, not the thick one.

None of this is a forecast, and the research note is a view rather than a finding. But it does point at a measurable thing. As tokenised equity and fund products grow, the split of fees between issuer, custodian, chain and venue will become observable in public filings and in onchain fee data, and it will settle the argument in a way that narrative cannot.