Private equity and venture capital funds create an illusion of stability by avoiding daily mark-to-market pricing. This "laundering of volatility" is a core reason companies stay private longer. It reveals a key, if artificial, benefit of private markets that new technologies like tokenization could disrupt.

The tokenization of real-world assets is not evenly distributed. Private credit is the leading category, making up 50% of the market. Its appeal lies in using the blockchain as a neutral settlement layer, simplifying counterparty transactions without complex system integrations.

Polymarket's major backing from the NYSE's parent company validates the trend of turning all information and events into liquid, tokenized markets. This "financialization of everything" will disrupt established industries, from sports betting to traditional finance, by offering more efficient, decentralized alternatives.

The next evolution in fintech will be regulated applications that offer seamless trading across traditional securities, tokenized assets, and native crypto. This framework allows direct user access to DeFi protocols like staking and lending from a single, compliant, and user-friendly platform, bridging the gap between two currently separate financial worlds.

Creating synthetic derivatives (like perpetual futures) of traditional assets on-chain is more scalable and efficient than creating direct tokenized copies. This is especially true for assets with high derivative demand, such as emerging market equities.

While stablecoins gain attention, tokenized deposits offer similar benefits—like on-chain transactions—but operate within the existing, trusted regulatory banking framework. As they are simply bank liabilities on a blockchain, they may become a more palatable alternative for corporates seeking efficiency without regulatory uncertainty.

The key benefit of tokenizing private credit or real estate is not just efficiency, but fractionalizing large, illiquid assets into smaller, tradable units. This unlocks global capital from family offices and other investors who cannot afford the traditional high minimum investment tickets.

After years of exploring various use cases, crypto's clearest product-market fit is as a new version of the financial system. The success of stablecoins, prediction markets, and decentralized trading platforms demonstrates that financial applications are where crypto currently has the strongest, most undeniable traction.

The next evolution in fintech is a single, unified platform where users can leverage one pool of capital to trade seamlessly across equities, crypto, and prediction markets. This eliminates the friction of managing separate accounts and KYC processes for different asset classes.