This blog is a preview of our forthcoming report, “The New Rails: How Digital Assets Are Reshaping the Foundations of Finance.” Reserve your copy!Summary
No single blockchain is the right answer for every asset. The “best” chain depends entirely on what’s being tokenized: a money market fund has fundamentally different infrastructure needs than a high-frequency trading application.
Low fees matter less than predictable fees. For financial institutions running daily operations, a network that occasionally spikes to hundreds of dollars per transaction (like Bitcoin during congestion) can pose more operational risk than one with slightly higher, but stable baseline costs.
Speed can have two definitions, and institutions need to know which one they’re prioritizing. Raw throughput (how many transactions per second) and time to finality (when a transaction is truly irreversible) are not synonymous. For high-value settlement, only the latter counts.
Custody concentration is a hidden systemic risk. When one exchange dominates the custody of assets on a given network, a shock to that entity — a hack, a run, an insolvency — can become a shock to the entire ecosystem.
