Citi projected the global market for tokenized securities will reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, up from roughly $17 billion today, in a Global Perspectives & Solutions report titled Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain released Monday ahead of the Proof of Talk conference in Paris.
The base case sits inside a $2.7 trillion-to-$8.2 trillion adoption cone. Citi assumes 10% of the U.S. Treasury bill market and 3% of the U.S. public stock market are tokenized by 2030, with a $1.9 trillion stablecoin float generating about $1 trillion in fresh on-chain Treasury demand, and a retail rotation onto digital trading platforms pulling roughly $2.6 trillion into tokenized equities.
Private credit and private equity, by contrast, are each projected to reach only about $100 billion globally over the same window — confirming that the forecast is overwhelmingly a public-markets call, not a private-asset one.
The figure is the most quantified institutional case yet for a thesis that has been compounding through bulge-bracket research desks for three years. Ronit Ghose, Citi's global head of Future of Finance, is scheduled to present the report on the main stage at Proof of Talk at the Louvre on Tuesday, organizers said.
What Sits Behind the Number
Citi attributes the $5.5 trillion path to three converging forces. The first is post-trade infrastructure: the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., Nasdaq and Intercontinental Exchange — the owner of the New York Stock Exchange — are embedding tokenization into core trading systems rather than ring-fencing it in sandboxes. DTCC plans a tokenized-securities pilot in July with a broader launch in October, and last week selected Stellar as a second public blockchain for the rollout.
The second is settlement. Stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits, the report argues, complete the on-chain leg by giving traders a cash instrument that settles atomically against tokenized assets. Because stablecoin issuers hold short-dated U.S. government debt to back their float, the $1.9 trillion stablecoin assumption alone mechanically delivers the $1 trillion in net new T-bill demand the model relies on.
The third is policy. The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act on May 14 in a 15-9 bipartisan vote, breaking a four-month stall, and the SEC under Commissioner Hester Peirce has signaled an innovation exemption for digital representations of NMS stock.
Where the Forecast Sits Among Peer Macros
Citi's number lands between McKinsey's base case of roughly $2 trillion in tokenized market cap by 2030 — a forecast that excludes stablecoins and crypto and which McKinsey itself flagged as "still far away" from broad adoption — and the Boston Consulting Group/ADDX projection of $16 trillion across illiquid assets by the same date. Standard Chartered, on a shorter clock, pencils in $4 trillion on-chain by the end of 2028, evenly split between stablecoins and other RWAs. Citi's own 2023 GPS report, "Money, Tokens, and Games," had pencilled $4 trillion to $5 trillion in tokenized securities by 2030; the new study raises the base case modestly and shifts the asset mix from private debt and real estate toward T-bills and listed equities.
Where the Forecast Could Slip
The model rests on stablecoin float roughly tripling and on regulators clearing the perimeter for tokenized listed stocks — neither is locked in. Citi also concedes that legacy and on-chain systems will run in parallel for years, comparing the transition to electronic-toll-tag adoption, where roads carried both cash and E-ZPass lanes for nearly a decade before the cutover. Live RWA inventory is still small enough to keep the projection theoretical: Franklin Templeton's tokenized Treasury fund crossed $2.5 billion last week, and Circle's USYC reached $2.9 billion on BNB Chain — meaningful proof points, but two orders of magnitude away from the $5.5 trillion line.
The report flags the biggest winners as "Structural Orchestrators" — institutions that own both the asset and the cash-leg rail, and can clear the trade inside their own perimeter.