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Stablecoin transaction volumes hit $33 trillion in 2025, exceeding the combined throughput of Visa and Mastercard. Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, now holds $141 billion in US Treasury bills – more than Germany, the UAE, and Australia combined. Total value locked on blockchain peaked at $237 billion last year. These metrics represent balance sheets, and balance sheets need to be managed.
That is the context Calastone uses to open its latest whitepaper on tokenised fund distribution in Asia, published this week. The report draws on a survey of 52 asset managers and seven DeFi platforms conducted by ValueExchange, and it frames the tokenised fund opportunity as fundamentally a treasury management story.
DeFi platforms – for all their blockchain-native infrastructure – still largely rely on traditional money market funds and bank deposits to manage their cash. Asset managers that can offer tokenised versions of those same products stand to acquire an entirely new investor cohort, without restructuring their underlying funds at all.
The approach gaining traction is deliberately minimal. Rather than digitising the entire fund value chain, asset managers are tokenising only the fund unit, leaving the underlying structure intact. This lets them reach new investors quickly, often without creating new share classes, and with minimal changes to existing systems. Among the asset managers surveyed, roughly three-quarters have already put a tokenised project in motion, and 65% of those who have launched a fund report it offers real benefits over the traditional model, with new customer access and automation the most commonly cited.
The product that fits best is the money market fund. MMFs are low risk, liquid, and yield-bearing, and they integrate naturally with digital wallets and stablecoin settlement. The early institutional evidence is compelling. BlackRock's BUIDL fund is now accepted as collateral for institutional trading on Binance. J.P. Morgan launched an intraday repo solution using tokenised collateral that hit $1 billion in daily trading volume within its first month.
Among the DeFi platforms surveyed, eight in ten said tokenised MMFs could improve how their treasuries manage assets, and three-quarters see them as a client retention tool. Within five years, half expect to increase their tokenised holdings by at least 25%.
The broader market projections reflect this momentum. Calastone projects tokenised fund AUM growing from $4 billion in 2024 to $235 billion by 2029 – a 58x increase. PwC is more bullish, projecting $715 billion by 2030. Tokenised MMF AUM alone grew from $4 billion at the start of 2025 to $8.6 billion by November, a 110% increase in under a year. The share of asset managers actively distributing tokenised funds is expected to rise from 13% this year to 28% by 2030.
Asia-Pacific sits at the front of this shift. Some 85% of APAC asset managers embrace tokenisation, compared to 77% globally, and 66% expect to distribute through digital platforms and exchanges.
Two years ago, Calastone's prior research found 86% of Asian asset managers expected to offer tokenised funds within three years. That specific timeline proved ambitious, but the direction has held. The question facing the region has shifted, though. It is no longer whether the products will exist. It is whether the external ecosystem can support distribution at scale.
This is where APAC diverges from the global picture in a revealing way. For most asset managers globally, the primary obstacle is the business case: 44% say it is blocking progress, with a further 41% saying it is limiting it. In APAC, the business case concern ranks lower. The single largest blocker in the region is ecosystem building – 86% of APAC respondents said it was blocking their progress, compared to a global average of 34%. Legacy system integration, the issue that most frequently stalls European and North American managers, is far less likely to be a hard blocker in Asia. Privacy and security concerns are similarly less elevated.
The implication is that Asia has already cleared the internal readiness hurdles that are still tripping up managers elsewhere. The bottleneck has moved outside the firm. There is no shortage of product intent; there is a shortage of the interconnected distribution networks, interoperable blockchains, and multi-rail settlement infrastructure that would let that product reach investors at scale. Interoperability across chains is a blocking issue for 57% of APAC firms, compared to 28% in Europe and North America – a gap that reflects the more fragmented multi-chain environment across the region's markets.
APAC firms are also notably more open to non-bank stablecoins than their counterparts elsewhere. The region's settlement picture is one of expanding options rather than moving away from existing fiat rails, and 66% of APAC asset managers plan to distribute through digital platforms and exchanges. That pragmatism is a structural advantage, provided the infrastructure eventually supports it.
The regulatory backdrop is moving in the same direction. Hong Kong and Singapore are actively shaping frameworks for digital asset distribution. Thailand's SEC recently amended regulations to accommodate the sale and redemption of tokenised mutual funds – a market that, not long ago, would not have featured in any serious tokenisation conversation. HSBC and Standard Chartered have both been granted stablecoin licences in Hong Kong. Globally, Legal & General's liquidity funds, representing more than £50 billion in assets, are now live on Calastone's Tokenised Distribution Network in a production environment.
The core insight from Calastone's research is that the ecosystem problem cannot be solved by individual asset managers acting in isolation. The firms that will move fastest in Asia are those that work through established distribution networks rather than building proprietary infrastructure from scratch. APAC is the most enthusiastic region in the world for tokenised fund distribution, and its biggest obstacle is precisely the coordination problem that shared infrastructure is designed to solve.
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