BNB Chain's Thomas Chen Sees 3-5 Years for True On-Chain Tokenized Stock Ownership

Block Festival 2026, Seoul

BNB Chain's real-world asset balances crossed $6 billion in total value locked (TVL), the second-largest figure among public blockchains, and its tokenized stock holdings exceed $1 billion, the largest of any chain, chief business officer Thomas Chen said on Thursday at Block Festival 2026 in Seoul's Yeouido IFC forum. Speaking alongside Frederick Tan, business development deputy head at DeBlock, in a session built around the last mile of tokenized assets, Chen argued that those balances measure distribution rather than arrival. The BNB price question aside, the panel's central message concerned timing: tokenized stocks that carry genuine ownership of the underlying share are, in his projection, at least three years away, with a five-year horizon once regulation is weighed. Some regions already trade tokenized equities, but the hour gap between stock market and crypto market sessions and country-by-country restrictions remain unresolved. Chen mapped tokenization in three stages: whether an asset can be issued on-chain, how holders access and hold what is issued, and what the asset can actually do once held. The first stage, he said, is largely solved. Token issuance tooling has become commoditized and comparatively easy, yet the scale of assets actually used after issuance runs far below the scale minted. He pushed back on the idea that placing an asset on a layer-1 blockchain creates demand by itself: an asset without an established strong use case does not suddenly win holders because it is tokenized. On one side sits the supply of traditional assets and capital, on the other the demand of users, Chen said, and connecting the two is the distribution work ahead. For the web3 audience in the room, the thesis was that the market has moved past asking how much has been issued and must now ask where issued assets can actually be used.

Why Tokenized Treasuries Grew First

Chen used tokenized US Treasuries as the market's clearest proof case. Crypto futures trading desks already depend on stablecoins that move around the clock, settle instantly and serve as margin collateral, he noted, and a tokenized Treasury replicates those functions while adding a yield of roughly 3.5% when market depth is sufficient. Treasuries grew fast because their use case existed before issuance, not the other way around. Accessibility now forms the harder bottleneck: investor eligibility, country-level restrictions, minimum ticket sizes, the time a buy or sell order takes to complete, and whether investors can find the product at all sit between an issued token and an active holder. Chen called this the last mile, adding that for tokenized assets to serve as collateral in decentralized finance or as the base of other financial products, teams capable of modeling the asset's risk must accept it and liquidity must be secured, whether through a liquidity pool or direct market makers. BNB Chain's answer is distribution. Where a financial institution running its own private ledger keeps transactions inside its system, a public blockchain can put financial products in front of investors across borders, Chen said, and products from global financial firms including BlackRock's BUIDL already run on the chain. He described the chain's roughly 4.5 million daily active users as the distribution network traditional issuers lack, and defined the last mile as letting investors outside the United States reach high-grade Western financial assets. The pace of issuance elsewhere supports his reading of a market running ahead of access: tokenized stocks hit 11% of DEX trading with BNB Chain leading, and a BNB treasury firm's tokenized stock surged 33.9% after Changpeng Zhao backed a BNB standard, both developments consistent with the gap he described between minted assets and usable ones. Technology, he concluded, will not decide the winner; distribution will, followed by the best user experience.

Distribution Decides the Winner

COINOTAG's reading is that Chen's 3-5 year window functions as the sector's working clock. The $6 billion RWA TVL and BlackRock's BUIDL presence on BNB Chain confirm institutions are willing to place products on public rails; the open question, as Chen framed it, is who can hold them and what they can be used for. Issuance tooling is commoditized, so competitive advantage now accrues to whoever controls distribution and user experience, a shift that favors chains with large active user bases over those chasing issued volume alone. Watch whether tokenized equity access expands beyond eligible regions, since that, not minting capacity, is where the next three years will be decided.