Answers
What does it mean to tokenize a real-world asset?
The answer
Tokenizing a real-world asset means representing it — credit, property, a fund interest, a commodity — as a transferable digital instrument that carries its ownership rights and transfer restrictions natively. The instrument settles on a distributed ledger; the asset, the law, and the obligations remain entirely real.
The engineering is now the easy part: legal wrappers exist, institutional custodians have entered, and settlement works. The hard part is distribution — the route by which the instrument reaches holders. An expensively tokenized asset with no holders is a database entry.
GDA structures tokenization mandates distribution-first, on the thesis set out in the firm's research: issuance is becoming a commoditized service, and the scarce position in this market is proximity to demand.