Tokenization could free up corporate cash, but how much? Faster settlement and around-the-clock access to securities could shrink liquidity buffers, provided companies can actually turn these assets into spendable funds.

Wall Street’s efficiency gains could become someone else’s liquidity problem. As settlement windows disappear, banks and corporate treasurers may inherit new funding demands, operational risks and 24/7 obligations.

The real prize may be corporate operating deposits. If businesses can keep more cash invested without sacrificing liquidity, banks risk losing valuable deposits while asset managers and infrastructure providers compete to capture the money and fees.

Wall Street is getting ready to modernize post-trade plumbing and experiment with tokenized real-world assets. But does that mean the corporate order book is moving onto the blockchain?

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The Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Tuesday (Nov. 3) cleared the way for perpetual futures tied to individual stocks to trade on registered exchanges in the United States, extending a defining feature of cryptocurrency markets into traditional equities and bringing offshore trading activity under U.S. supervision. Morgan Stanley this week was among the first banks to use the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s new tokenization infrastructure to tokenize popular U.S. stocks.

The question isn’t whether corporate treasurers need a blockchain strategy because Morgan Stanley has one, and the CFTC has greenlit certain products. It’s whether tokenization can change the economics of how companies manage liquidity.

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