Cathie Wood's Ark Invest is projecting **rapid growth** in tokenized assets over the rest of the decade, estimating the market could **surpass $11 trillion by 2030** as traditional financial instruments increasingly move onchain.

The real-world tokenized asset (RWA) market today stands at roughly $19–$22 billion, implying Ark's projection would require a roughly **50,000%–58,000% increase** over the next five years.

"In our view, broad based adoption of tokenization is likely to follow the development of **regulatory clarity** and **institutional-grade infrastructure**," Ark Invest said in its "Big Ideas 2026" report published Wednesday.

A tokenized asset is a digital representation of a financial instrument that trades on a **blockchain** rather than through traditional brokerage infrastructure. Proponents argue that tokenization can **reduce costs**, **shorten settlement times**, **deepen liquidity**, support **fractional ownership**, and expand **global access** to financial products by enabling **24/7 trading**.

## Institutional Tokenization Efforts Ramp Up

Institutional momentum around tokenization has accelerated in recent weeks. Earlier this week, the **New York Stock Exchange** said it is building a blockchain-based venue to enable around-the-clock trading of tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds, with plans to launch later this year pending regulatory approval.

Earlier today, **F/m Investments**, the firm behind the $6.3 billion U.S. Treasury 3-Month Bill ETF, said it has asked U.S. regulators for permission to record existing ETF shares on a blockchain. F/m Investments, founded in 2018, manages about $18 billion in assets.

Last week, custody bank **State Street** said it is rolling out a digital-asset platform to support money-market funds, ETFs, and cash products such as tokenized deposits and stablecoins. Around the same time, **London Stock Exchange Group** launched a Digital Settlement House designed to enable near-instant settlement across both blockchain-based and traditional payment systems.

Ark noted that **sovereign debt**, particularly U.S. Treasurys, currently dominates tokenized assets. However, the firm expects **bank deposits** and **global public equities** to account for a larger share of tokenized value over the next five years as institutions move beyond pilot programs.

At its projected $11 trillion size in 2030, Ark estimates tokenized assets would still represent only about **1.38% of total global financial assets**. "With most global value still off-chain, traditional assets remain the largest growth opportunity for onchain adoption," the firm said.

![Ark Invest Tokenization Projection](https://www.tbstat.com/cdn-cgi/image/f=avif,q=50/wp/uploads/2026/01/ark-tokenization.png)

*Source: Ark Invest*

Other major institutions and consultancies have also outlined multi-trillion-dollar outlooks for tokenization.

**TD Cowen** has said onchain assets could grow to as much as **$100 trillion by 2030**. The **Boston Consulting Group**, in a report published with Ripple, projects that tokenized assets could expand to nearly **$19 trillion by 2033**. **Citi** forecasts up to $4 trillion in tokenized digital securities, alongside as much as $5 trillion in central bank digital currencies circulating across major economies. **Standard Chartered** estimates tokenized real-world assets could reach **$2 trillion by 2028**, with the "vast majority" issued on Ethereum. **McKinsey**, meanwhile, projects tokenized real-world asset markets reaching $2 trillion to $4 trillion by the end of the decade.

## Bitcoin Price Outlook

Ark Invest also projects a sharp expansion in crypto markets more broadly, with **bitcoin expected to reach a market capitalization of around $16 trillion** and the total crypto market growing to roughly **$28 trillion by 2030**.

A $16 trillion bitcoin market cap would imply a price of about **$761,900 per BTC**, assuming the fixed supply of 21 million coins. Bitcoin is currently trading around $90,000.

While sovereign debt dominates tokenization today, Ark expects bank deposits and global public equities to move a greater share.

Ark Invest Predicts Tokenized Assets Could Skyrocket to $11 Trillion by 2030 - Is This the Future of Finance?

Donald Trump is expressing deep concerns about data centers and their impact on the U.S. electricity market. He fears that rising energy costs could fuel public resentment and jeopardize his party's chances in the upcoming November elections.

**Trump's anxiety is evident in recent actions.** On January 13, he and Microsoft's president announced that the tech giant would pay more for its data centers, including full property taxes and no electricity rate discounts in towns where they operate. Trump emphasized on Truth Social: "We are the 'HOTTEST' Country in the World, and Number One in AI. Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must 'pay their own way.'"

On January 16, Trump and governors in the northeastern U.S. directed the country's largest power grid operator to hold an emergency reliability power auction by September. This move could force tech giants to bid on future electricity reliability, potentially funding new power plants.

OpenAI followed suit on January 20, committing to "paying our own way on energy, so that our operations don't increase your electricity prices." The company is part of the Stargate collaboration with the Trump administration, investing $500 billion in AI infrastructure.

**Trump is grappling with the challenge of rapidly rising electricity demand.** He promised to slash Americans' electricity bills by half, but there's little prospect of delivering on that vow. While AI increases electricity demand, the administration is blocking renewable energy projects, calling them a "scam," and pushing for gas and oil expansion. Reversing the closure of ageing coal plants and restarting LNG exports could further raise costs for domestic consumers.

Power prices tie into larger cost-of-living concerns in the U.S., putting Trump's party on the defensive ahead of congressional elections.

**Elon Musk is also involved in this story.** On January 15, the EPA ruled that Musk's company xAI had illegally operated methane-powered generators at its Memphis facility. This sets a precedent: tech companies can't simply use backup generators; they may need to purchase nuclear power plants, as Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have done.

**European governments face similar challenges.** In Germany, high energy prices constrain data center growth. Chancellor Friedrich Merz favors constructing more data centers but has taken an opposite approach to Trump, agreeing to subsidize heavy industrial electricity use until 2028 and reduce grid fees. Data centers in Germany must source half their electricity from renewables, but public skepticism remains.

In the UK, with the second-highest number of data centers in Europe, construction is expanding amid rising energy costs. Electricity rates are already among the highest globally, worsening the cost-of-living crisis. Despite this, the government proposed electricity discounts for data centers in "AI growth zones" to encourage investment.

**Ireland serves as a cautionary tale.** Data centers' electricity use overtook that of all urban homes in 2024, straining the grid and raising costs. The Irish government imposed a ban on new data centers connecting to Dublin's power grid in 2021, which ended in December.

**The data center boom is expanding to new regions.** Trump and tech giants plan to build one of the world's largest data centers in the UAE and others in Gulf states, where energy is cheap but water is scarce for cooling. Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have announced $17 billion in investments in India, where electricity reliability is lower, potentially requiring grid modernization or prolonging ageing infrastructure use.

The president wants big tech to pay more for electricity, but he’s curbing renewable projects that could boost supply

Trump's Election Fears: How Data Centers Could Derail His Party's Ambitions

## Network News

**ETH STAKING EXIT QUEUE DROPS TO ZERO**: Ethereum is processing more transactions than at any point in its history, with daily activity pushing to new records last week. The network processed a record **2,885,524 transactions** last week, the highest daily count in its history. The surge caps a sharp pickup in onchain activity this month, with transaction volumes pushing to new highs into early 2026. Activity has accelerated since mid-December, reversing a gradual slowdown that persisted through much of 2025. At the same time, average fees remain near recent lows, even with the pickup in usage. The combination points to a network that is absorbing higher demand more smoothly than past cycles, helped by recent upgrades and more activity moving to layer-2 networks. Staking dynamics have also shifted. **Ethereum's validator exit queue has fallen to zero**, meaning stakers can now withdraw ETH almost immediately, while entry queues still show long waits. The empty exit queue mainly shows there isn't a big rush to lock up ETH or pull it out right now, and staking looks steady rather than in a boom.

**NEOBANK TRENDS GROWS THANKS TO STABLECOINS AND PAYMENTS**: For years, crypto's most ambitious builders focused on the industry's plumbing: faster blockchains, cleaner smart contracts, better protocol economics. But a growing number of projects are now stepping away from the base layer and into something far more familiar to everyday users: payments, cards and neobank-like services. The shift reflects a broader realization inside crypto: while protocols matter, adoption tends to follow utility. Projects are now starting to pitch something else: that users can spend, save, and borrow with crypto without needing to understand the technicalities underneath it all. The evolution in messaging comes as **stablecoins are positioned as having an everyday financial use case**. Research from Messari argues the next phase of crypto neobanks won't simply mirror fintech apps on top of blockchains, but instead will attempt to rebuild core banking functions, like spending and borrowing directly onchain without relying on traditional payment rails. Ethereum restaking platform ether.fi was among the crypto-native projects to make that pivot, moving beyond protocol development toward offering payment and banking-style services built on top of decentralized finance. Since then, the trend has only accelerated. Polygon, long known primarily as a scaling network for Ethereum, recently announced new acquisitions for crypto rails and payments infrastructure for stablecoin use cases.

**VITALIK PROPOSES DVT STAKING**: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a proposal to build **distributed validator technology (DVT) directly into Ethereum's staking protocol**, aiming to make staking more resilient while dramatically reducing technical complexity for large ETH holders. DVT enables validators to operate across multiple machines rather than relying on a single node. In existing implementations, a validator's cryptographic key is split across multiple nodes that collectively sign messages. As long as more than two-thirds of those nodes behave honestly, the validator continues to operate normally without risking penalties such as slashing or inactivity leaks. While DVT is already in use in some protocols today, Buterin argues that these solutions remain difficult to set up and maintain. They often require complex inter-node networking and depend on cryptographic properties that may not be suitable in the long term. Buterin's proposal replaces that complexity with a protocol-level solution. Instead of relying on external coordination layers, Ethereum itself would support validators that operate as groups.

**SOLAYER UNVEILS $35M FUND**: Solayer unveiled a **$35 million ecosystem fund** to back blockchain applications built on its infiniSVM network, targeting projects that require real-time execution and can generate sustainable revenue. The capital comes from Solayer Labs and the Solayer Foundation. The fund will support early and growth-stage teams building on infiniSVM, a layer-1 blockchain compatible with Solana's tooling but designed for faster execution and near-instant settlement. Solayer said the network has demonstrated throughput above **330,000 transactions per second** and finality of roughly 400 milliseconds. "We're solving for real-time behavior, immediate, guaranteed settlement and low latency," said Joshua Sum, Solayer's chief product officer. "Most blockchains still batch transactions, like legacy financial systems. We want to replace that with actual real-time clearing."

## In Other News

* Galaxy Digital is working on a **$100 million hedge fund** aimed at profiting from the turbulence roiling the digital assets and fintech industries. The fund, expected to start up in the first quarter, will take both long and short positions, meaning it plans to make money both when prices go up and when they fall. About 30% of the capital will be allocated to crypto tokens. The rest will target financial services stocks Galaxy believes are being reshaped by digital asset technologies and shifting regulations.
* Cryptocurrency's security story is changing, and not in the way most investors expect or would like to, as while crypto losses are on the rise, so too is onchain security. Even as 2025 went down as the worst year for hacks on record, the biggest failures weren't born onchain; instead, they were operational. Passwords, keys, compromised devices, manipulated employees, fake support agents. Human error, not broken code. "Despite 2025 being the worst year for hacks on record, those hacks stem from Web2 operational failures, not onchain code," Mitchell Amador, CEO of onchain security platform Immunefi, told CoinDesk. That distinction matters, Amador said, because it suggests something counterintuitive: onchain security is improving, even as losses keep rising.

## Regulatory and Policy

* Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said his company decided to oppose a major digital assets bill at the last minute after discovering provisions that raised serious concerns for consumer protection and market competition. "The high-level principle is that you can't really have banks come in and try and kill their competition at the expense of the American consumer," he told CNBC. Armstrong said Coinbase and other crypto firms had remained committed to negotiations until late in the process, but that a close review of the draft legislation revealed issues the company believed would have been damaging if the bill had advanced out of committee. The U.S. Senate Banking Committee will no longer hold today's planned markup of its crypto market structure bill after crypto exchange Coinbase publicly withdrew its support for the legislation on Wednesday, compounding fractures in negotiations that had already left the measure on shaky ground.
* U.S. lawmakers were about to begin a hearing on a major crypto bill that aimed to define how federal regulators can oversee crypto markets, but the night before the hearing was about to start, Coinbase, one of the biggest crypto exchanges that has been deeply involved in the bill's negotiations, suddenly withdrew its support. This sent the whole industry into chaos. Just hours later, that same Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee canceled the hearing on the crypto market structure bill — just over 12 hours before it was scheduled to kick off. Following the announcements, lawmakers relaunched talks on Friday, with Democrats and staffers holding a call with industry representatives. However, Coinbase was not alone in having issues with the bill. The general concern was that different provisions in the bill would make it more difficult for crypto startups to launch tokens or operate anything resembling a decentralized project.

## Calendar

* Feb. 10-12, 2026: Consensus, Hong Kong
* Feb. 17-21, 2026: EthDenver, Denver
* Feb. 23-24, 2026: NearCon, San Francisco
* Mar. 30-Apr. 2, 2026: EthCC, Cannes
* Apr.15-16, 2026: Paris Blockchain Week, Paris
* May 5-7, 2026: Consensus, Miami
* Nov. 3-6, 2026: Devcon, Mumbai
* Nov. 15-17, 2026: Solana Breakpoint, London

Also: Neobanks trending, DVT staking proposal and Solayer $35M fund

Ethereum's Staking Exit Queue Hits Zero: What This Means for ETH Holders and the Future of Crypto Banking

Don't believe the hype when it comes to meme coins or longtime market laggards.

A couple of weeks into 2026, the cryptocurrency market appears to be roaring back to life. With just a few exceptions, every major cryptocurrency is up to start the year as I write this.

But I'm not convinced that this rally is going to persist throughout the year. The following four cryptocurrencies are at serious risk of a decline of 50% or more in value. You have been warned.

## 1. & 2. Dogecoin and Shiba Inu

Let's start with the obvious picks first: **Dogecoin** (DOGE) and **Shiba Inu** (SHIB). Both of these **meme coins** are up more than 15% to start 2026, but I think this is really just a **dead-dog bounce**. These meme coins are fundamentally worthless, and their massive market caps are really just a result of their very high circulating coin supplies.

![Close-up of a Shiba Inu dog.](https://g.foolcdn.com/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fg.foolcdn.com%2Feditorial%2Fimages%2F851121%2Fdogecoin-dog-copy.jpg&w=3840&op=resize)

Just look at the numbers for both meme coins—they're beyond atrocious. For example, Dogecoin is trading at an 82% discount to its all-time high from May 2021. If **Elon Musk** can't save Dogecoin, nobody can. I think there's further to fall, as investors give up on these two meme coins entirely.

## 3. Cardano

Touted as a potential **Ethereum** (ETH) challenger when it launched back in 2017, **Cardano** (ADA) is going nowhere fast these days. Yes, Cardano is up 15% to start the year. But zoom out and take a nice, long look at the five-year chart for Cardano. It doesn't inspire confidence. I'm no longer confident that Cardano can break through the $1 price level anytime soon.

Right now, Cardano has a market cap of nearly $14 billion. If it loses 50% of its value, it would approach the market cap of **Sui** (SUI), an up-and-coming Ethereum challenger that launched in 2023. I'd rather put my money into Sui right now than wait for Cardano to move higher.

## 4. Litecoin

**Litecoin** (LTC) has been a real standout so far this year, but for all the wrong reasons. Of all major cryptocurrencies with a market cap of $1 billion or higher, Litecoin is among only a handful that are actually down for the year. Over the past 90 days, Litecoin is down more than 20%.

At some point, investors are going to throw in the towel on Litecoin. The much-ballyhooed Litecoin halving event of August 2023 was a complete nothingburger, and even the promise of new spot Litecoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) last year did little to boost its prospects.

If Litecoin loses 50% of its value, it would approach the value of **Bittensor** (TAO), a highly speculative artificial intelligence (AI) coin. I'd rather take my chances with a cryptocurrency tied to the future of AI than put an underperforming **proof-of-work coin** in my portfolio.

## Can these cryptocurrencies ever turn things around?

It's almost impossible to think that these longtime market laggards are suddenly going to turn things around in 2026. I predict they will plunge big time. The only possible scenario is if **Bitcoin** goes absolutely *en fuego*, helping to light a fire under the entire crypto market.

But even if that happens, I'd rather own Bitcoin than Litecoin. I'd rather own Ethereum than Cardano. And I'd rather own just about any cryptocurrency (no matter how speculative) than Dogecoin or Shiba Inu.

Don't believe the hype when it comes to meme coins or longtime market laggards.

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