Tokenization brings more "icing on the cake" benefits to financial assets, but offers "timely assistance" to real industries
At the Token Economy Forum of the 2025 Inclusion·Bund Conference held on September 11, Ant Group Co., Ltd. Research Institute released China's first industry report focusing on token economy - "Real World Token Economy 2025" (hereinafter referred to as "the Report"). The Report indicates that token economy is transitioning from a "niche experimental ground" in the virtual world to the vast landscape of serving the real economy, returning to its value origins.
The Report proposes that the token economy industry is no longer merely about simply putting off-chain assets on-chain, but is committed to building a real-world token economy ecosystem, using tokens as new value carriers to achieve more efficient value circulation and collaboration.
The Report points out that Real World Asset tokenization (RWA) and tokenized payment settlement are important pillars of ecosystem development: the former can provide rich value targets, while the latter drives efficient circulation. Additionally, trusted technology serves as the underlying capability, providing solid security for the system.
The Report emphasizes that successfully scaled assets achieving "tokenizability" must meet three major conditions: verifiable status, programmable ownership, and quantifiable value. Currently, RWA has become the second-fastest growing category in the crypto market, but the vast majority is still dominated by private credit and U.S. Treasury bonds, with relatively limited industrial asset implementation cases.
"Tokenization brings more 'icing on the cake' benefits to financial assets, but offers 'timely assistance' to real industries," said Li Zhenhua, Director of Ant Group Co., Ltd. Research Institute. The real value blue ocean of tokenization lies in serving real financing needs, and the shift from investment demand-driven to financing demand-driven is an inevitable future trend.
The Report proposes that tokenized payment settlement networks, as the "circulatory system" of the token economy, can efficiently support value circulation. In the future, new payment tools such as central bank digital currencies and commercial bank tokenization are expected to develop synergistically, reshaping cross-institutional and cross-border settlement systems.
In terms of trust mechanisms, secure and trusted environments are viewed as the core guarantee of the token economy. The improvement of global regulatory frameworks brings legal trust and institutional foundation to tokenization. Institutions need to build trusted environments from three major aspects: asset authenticity, identity compliance, and transaction security, integrating security governance deeply into tokenization strategies to establish sustainable and scalable ecosystems.
The Report also calls for collaborative construction among regulators, technology companies, financial institutions and other parties to promote tokenization innovation to safely and effectively empower the real economy, opening a new chapter in the application of digital assets in the real world.