South Korean asset management giant Mirae Asset Securities has partnered with Polygon Labs to advance tokenization and Web3 onboarding within traditional finance.
Serving as a technical consultant for The Mirae Asset Security Token Working Group, Polygon Labs will build the infrastructure needed to issue and trade tokenized securities on Polygon – a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. That means converting real-world assets such as real estate, bonds, art, and equities into digital tokens on a blockchain.
The consortium operates independently of Mirae Asset, comprising various entities including Linger Studio and Coin Plug. Hana Financial, and SK Telecom’s Next Finance Initiative (NFI) which is focused on security tokens, are also operated separately.
“Through technical collaboration with Polygon Labs, Mirae Asset Securities aims to establish global leadership in the field of tokenized securities,” said Ahn In-sung, head of the digital assets division at Mirae Asset Securities, in a press release on Thursday.
Polygon Lab’s Executive Chairman, Sandeep Nailwal, anticipates that Mirae Asset Securities’ efforts will accelerate the widespread adoption of Web3 technologies within the financial sector. He added:
“At the same time, Mirae’s initiatives will also greatly contribute to establishing interoperability between South Korea’s domestic financial systems and their foreign counterparts.”
The Growth of Tokenized Assets
The move towards asset tokenization is gathering momentum globally. Major financial institutions like Franklin Templeton and Hamilton Lane have already initiated tokenization projects on the Polygon platform. Furthermore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s experimental tokenization initiative, Project Guardian, successfully conducted foreign exchange and sovereign bond transactions on Polygon last year.
The government of El Salvador has also expressed interest in issuing tokenized Bitcoin bonds on the Liquid Bitcoin sidechain – though the bonds are yet to materialize.
Even MicroStrategy co-founder and revered Bitcoin maximalist Michael Saylor is on board with the idea. When questioned about Ordinals at during an interview at Bitcoin 2023 Miami, the billionaire suggested that the technology could be used to “tokenize all of the stocks and ETFs trading on NASDAQ.”
A dashboard provided by Dune Analytics estimates that tokenized public securities issued by Franklin and others have a total market cap of $343 million.
According to projections by Boston Consulting Group and ADDX, the business opportunity presented by asset tokenization is set to increase dramatically, possibly reaching $16.1 trillion by 2030, equivalent to 10% of the global GDP.
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