Citi Forecasts $5.5T Tokenization Market by 2030

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AI Summary

Citi Institute, the research arm of Citigroup’s Future of Finance team, has published Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain a June 2026 report that puts hard institutional numbers behind the trend that everyone covering the space has been describing in narrative form.

The headline forecasts:

The current global tokenized asset market sits at roughly $17 billion
By 2030, Citi projects this reaches $5.5 trillion in the base case
$2.7 trillion in the bear case, $8.2 trillion in the bull case
Regulated on-chain money — stablecoins and tokenized deposits projected at $1.9 trillion by 2030 as the settlement foundation

From $17 billion to $5.5 trillion in roughly four years is a ~320x multiple in the base case. From $17 billion to $8.2 trillion in the bull case is closer to 480x. Those are the kind of projections that sound absurd until you put them next to what’s actually been announced in the past 30 days.

The report is also explicit about which crypto-native infrastructure is doing the work behind the scenes. Stellar, Ripple, and Chainlink all get named in different contexts, for different reasons. Here’s what Citi actually says, and what each mention represents.

Citi Released Their Crypto Predictions!! It Mentions, Ripple, Stellar Lumens XLM & Chainlink LINK...

The three forces driving the projection

Citi attributes the acceleration to three converging dynamics, in order:

1. Major Financial Market Infrastructure providers integrating tokenization into core workflows. The report specifically names DTCC, the New York Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ as integrating tokenization into core issuance, trading, and settlement workflows — moving “well beyond experimentation.” DTCC alone, per Citi’s framing, received regulatory clearance in late 2025 to offer tokenized services for DTC-custodied assets, with a three-year pilot plan targeting late 2026.

That tracks exactly with what we covered when DTCC publicly announced it was connecting its tokenization service to Stellar.

2. Regulated on-chain money is providing the settlement foundation that was missing. Citi’s $1.9 trillion projection for tokenized cash by 2030 — stablecoins plus tokenized deposits — is the precondition for tokenized securities to actually settle on-chain at scale. Without compliant, scaled, regulated settlement money, tokenized assets are just digital wrappers that still settle in fiat. With it, they’re a fundamentally different category.

That tracks with VersaBank’s tokenized deposit pilot on Algorand and Ripple’s RLUSD selection for the Australian Government bond pilot.

3. Regulatory clarity is improving across key jurisdictions. Citi specifically cites the US Clarity Act continuing to move toward the Senate. The combination of clear rules for asset tokenization, stablecoin regulation, and digital asset custody is removing the binary “is this even legal” risk that held adoption back for years.

What Citi expects to drive early adoption

Citi’s view on where the growth comes from first is specific:

“Growth is expected to be led by public market security participants, particularly US equities and treasuries, rather than private markets where adoption remains early-stage and structurally constrained.”

And a specific data point that’s worth pulling out for the implications it carries:

“If 10% of US retail investors use on-chain solutions by 2030, this could increase about $2.6 trillion of demand for tokenized public equities.”

That’s a retail-driven supplementary force on top of institutional adoption — and 10% is not a heroic assumption given the demographic curve of digitally-native investors entering brokerage accounts over the next four years.

Where Stellar appears in the report

Citi cites Franklin Templeton’s on-chain US Government Money Market Fund (BENJI) as a flagship example of how regulated public-market issuances are migrating to public blockchains:

“Franklin Templeton’s on-chain US government money market fund originated on the Stellar network and has subsequently extended to Ethereum and others.”

BENJI is one of the most important institutional tokenization products in production today — a regulated US government money market fund with a tokenized share class running on a public blockchain. Citi specifically notes its Stellar origin in the same paragraph that discusses how tokenization moves from pilot to production.

Combined with the DTCC announcement that DTC-tokenized assets will be available on Stellar in H1 2027, and with IBM’s documented history of cross-border payments on Stellar going back to 2017, the Citi report’s Franklin Templeton citation is one more institutional brand attached to the same chain.

Where Ripple appears in the report

In the section discussing third-party forecasts for the size of tokenized asset markets, Citi cites:

“Ripple and Boston Consulting Group: $18.9 trillion by 2033.”

That projection — jointly authored by Ripple and BCG — is one of the most aggressive published forecasts for the total addressable market for tokenized real-world assets. Citi includes it alongside projections from ARK, Deutsche Bank, McKinsey & Company, and others, which range across a wide band of estimates. Ripple’s number sits at the higher end and explicitly extends the timeline to 2033 rather than 2030.

The point isn’t whether Ripple-BCG’s $18.9 trillion or Citi’s $5.5 trillion base case is “right.” The point is that institutional research from Citi is citing institutional research from Ripple in the same document, on the same topic. That’s a different positioning than where Ripple was even two years ago.

Where Chainlink appears in the report

Chainlink shows up in Citi’s section on cross-chain interoperability challenges. From the report:

“As of May 2025, financial service entities had adopted at least 72 different distributed or programmable ledgers. These digital islands are not inherently interoperable, limiting the ability to trade, settle, and move assets seamlessly across networks.”

Citi specifically calls out interoperability as “a consistent constraint” from industry stakeholder discussions, and then cites the standards effort to address it:

“A 2023 collaboration between ANZ Bank and Chainlink demonstrated how CCIP can connect private permissioned blockchains with public networks such as Ethereum to enable settlement for tokenization across institutional and decentralized environments.”

That’s Chainlink CCIP — the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol — being cited by Citi as the demonstrated bridge between permissioned institutional environments and public blockchains. In a world where Citi itself projects “achieving seamless cross-network settlement and transfer is increasingly seen as a prerequisite for building efficient global tokenized markets,” that’s not a small endorsement.

Ryan Rugg, Citi Token Services, and the Hedera connection

Ryan Rugg, who leads Digital Assets at Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, gave a public presentation at Hederacon that mirrors much of what’s in the Tokenization 2030 report. Her framing of Citi’s own product — Citi Token Services — is worth quoting in full because it explains how a top-five US bank is actually thinking about delivering blockchain infrastructure to corporate clients:

“We view that digital assets and RWAs are just another tool in the toolkit if our clients want to use them, and we’re making sure that they’re backwards compatible and they’re interoperable… If you have your traditional cash and you have your tokenized deposits that can fix the gap of weekends and holidays but you’re able to have the fungibility between both instantaneously — if you want to move money from New York to Singapore we move in under a minute and then deposit cash back in your account.”

On the design philosophy:

“We’ve tried to obfuscate the complexity of digital assets and blockchains as much as possible. Clients don’t have to open new accounts, they don’t have to have wallets, they don’t have to manage keys. They just actually get the underlying utility of being able to move money across the globe. We’re live in five-plus branches with new branches coming on. We’re adding additional currencies. We now have USD and Euro. Everything we do is based on client demand.”

And the question that defines whether the bet works:

“Do our clients care if they’re on-prem or in cloud or do they want just the programmability? They care if they’re in data centers or in servers — no. We’ll be successful if clients don’t even actually know they’re using a blockchain.”

That’s the institutional thesis distilled. The end-state is invisible blockchain infrastructure delivering 24/7/365 multi-currency settlement to corporate treasurers who never need to know what chain they’re on. Citi Token Services is a real product, in production, expanding to new currency corridors based on actual client demand.

What the report doesn’t quite say — but implies

Three observations the report builds the architecture for, but stops short of stating directly:

1. The “structural orchestrator” concept is a competitive moat. Citi introduces the term to describe institutions that control both asset issuance AND settlement rails. The implicit message: traditional post-trade intermediaries are about to feel structural pressure, and the institutions that own the new vertical stack (asset issuance + tokenized cash + on-chain settlement) capture the revenue pools. Banks, asset managers, and stablecoin issuers are all in the race for that position.

2. “Hybrid models will dominate in the near term” is an honest constraint, not a bearish signal. Tokenization isn’t going to displace existing rails overnight. Parallel operation creates operational complexity before efficiency gains materialize. But the trend line is one-direction: complexity drops as production scales.

3. Interoperability is now a market-clearing requirement. 72 different ledgers in use across financial services as of May 2025 is the problem statement. Chainlink’s CCIP being cited as the demonstrated solution is a competitive positioning that the report makes explicit. The chain that wins interoperability earns a different kind of moat than chain-specific bets.

Why this matters for the broader picture

Three takeaways for crypto investors, in order of confidence:

1. The institutional research-to-action gap is closing. When McKinsey and BCG were the only firms publishing tokenization forecasts, the work felt aspirational. Citi Institute — the in-house research arm of one of the largest US banks — publishing concrete base/bear/bull projections, citing specific industry collaborations, and naming the same crypto-native infrastructure (Stellar, Ripple, Chainlink) we’ve been writing about for months is qualitatively different. This is research designed to inform actual capital allocation decisions inside Citi and at Citi’s institutional clients.

2. The chains being named are the chains being chosen. Compare Citi’s mentions to what’s actually been announced in the past two weeks: DTCC connecting to Stellar, XRP Ledger and RLUSD picked for Australian Government bonds, VersaBank choosing Algorand for tokenized deposits, Hedera in four of seven Project Acacia use cases. The Citi report sits inside the same narrative as every one of these — and the cryptos it specifically names overlap heavily.

3. The retail catalyst is real. $2.6 trillion of demand for tokenized public equities from 10% US retail adoption by 2030 is the number nobody else is writing about — and it’s where the volume curve gets dramatic if the demographics cooperate. Citi flagging this means their research team thinks it’s plausible enough to put a number on.

Bigger picture

Six months ago, the institutional tokenization story was “this might happen eventually.” Today, it’s a stack of reports, regulatory clearances, production pilots, and named blockchain choices that all line up:

Citi: $5.5T base case by 2030, Stellar/Ripple/Chainlink named
DTCC: SEC-authorized tokenization service connecting to Stellar in H1 2027
BlackRock: BUIDL on Ethereum, expanding multi-chain
Franklin Templeton: BENJI on Stellar, extending to Ethereum
VersaBank: USDVB tokenized deposit pilot on Algorand, Ethereum, Stellar
RBA: Project Acacia ran on Hedera (4 use cases), XRPL with RLUSD, and other DLTs

The unifying pattern: regulated finance is moving real workloads onto public distributed ledgers, chain by chain, use case by use case, with research and product converging on the same shortlist of crypto-native infrastructure.

The Citi report is one of the clearest statements yet that this trend has graduated from “experimental” to “structural.” The next four years will determine which chains capture the bulk of the $5.5–$8.2 trillion that Wall Street is preparing to migrate on-chain.

Sources

Citi Institute — Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain (June 2026), authored by Citi’s Future of Finance team
Ryan Rugg, Head of Digital Assets at Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions — public commentary, Hederacon
Citi Token Services — production deployment data
Ripple + Boston Consulting Group — joint $18.9 trillion by 2033 tokenized asset forecast (referenced in Citi report)
BlackRock BUIDL fund on Ethereum (multi-chain)
Franklin Templeton on-chain US Government Money Market Fund (BENJI) — originated on Stellar
ANZ Bank × Chainlink CCIP — 2023 cross-chain settlement demonstration (cited in Citi report)

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