This trend is being sold as inevitable. It deserves more skepticism than it is getting.
Every few months, a major exchange announces plans to tokenize another asset class. Pre-IPO company shares. Bonds. Real estate. Commodities. The narrative has calcified: blockchain technology will eventually replace traditional settlement infrastructure because it is faster, cheaper, and more transparent. Resistance is merely delay before the inevitable arrives.
But inevitability is a marketing strategy, not a law of physics.
The latest moves by major platforms to expand perpetuals trading into pre-IPO assets illustrate a broader pattern worth examining. These exchanges are not simply responding to market demand. They are actively reshaping what demand looks like by offering what regulators have traditionally restricted. The framing of "democratization" obscures something simpler: these platforms profit from transaction volume and leverage, regardless of whether the underlying infrastructure actually solves problems that needed solving.
Consider what tokenization actually requires. It demands a complete reimagining of custody, settlement, corporate governance, and regulatory oversight. It means pension funds and institutions would need to overhaul their infrastructure. It means accepting counterparty risk from blockchain validators instead of established clearinghouses. These are not technical problems awaiting elegant solutions. They are structural questions about who bears responsibility when systems fail.
The evidence supporting tokenization's inevitability remains thin. Most tokenized assets live in low-liquidity, high-volatility ecosystems where price discovery is uncertain. When volume matters, users flee back to traditional systems. The few success stories tend to involve either pure speculation (where anything can trade anywhere) or niche use cases that never required broader institutional adoption. Neither proves inevitability.
What we see instead is a determined push from platforms whose business models depend on expanding tradeable asset classes. When Bybit adds pre-IPO perpetuals or when other exchanges pursue similar strategies, they are not responding to institutional requests for this specific infrastructure. They are creating permission structures that sidestep traditional gatekeepers. The financial engineering works. The inevitability narrative does not.
The regulatory question looms larger than exchange marketing suggests. If tokenizing pre-IPO shares means ordinary retail investors can leverage trade on companies they cannot otherwise access, regulators face genuine policy questions about disclosure, manipulation, and systemic risk. These are not bureaucratic obstacles to overcome. They reflect legitimate concerns about market structure.
This does not mean tokenization has no future. Specific use cases may prove genuinely useful. International settlement could become more efficient. Cross-border transactions might bypass expensive intermediaries. But these gains exist on a spectrum, not as binary inevitability.
The problem with inevitability framing is that it discourages asking harder questions. Which assets actually benefit from tokenization? Which stakeholders gain most from the transition? Who bears the risks if these systems fail at scale? What infrastructure gaps would tokenization actually close that cannot be closed incrementally?
Exchanges have incentives to present tokenization as inevitable because that narrative attracts capital, talent, and regulatory flexibility. It makes early betting seem prudent and late skepticism seem foolish. But markets are shaped by choices, not destiny. The same infrastructure that can tokenize pre-IPO shares could be optimized for traditional settlement instead. The choice is not predetermined.
A healthy skepticism does not require rejecting blockchain technology or dismissing tokenization's potential. It requires recognizing that platforms promoting these systems have financial motivations worth scrutinizing. It means asking whether faster settlement actually solves the problems institutions care about, or whether it simply creates new risks they have learned to manage with the old system.
The future may indeed bring broader tokenization. But its inevitability is asserted, not demonstrated. Until the evidence catches up to the marketing, healthy skepticism remains not just justified but necessary.