Jürgen Blumberg from Centrifuge
For most investors, ETFs and tokenized assets still appear to belong to different worlds. ETFs are familiar, regulated, and comfortably held in brokerage accounts. Tokenized assets, by contrast, are associated with crypto-native platforms, digital wallets, and a vocabulary that can feel opaque to some outside the digital asset ecosystem.
Yet beneath the surface, these two worlds are already moving toward each other. Over time, the distinction between an “ETF” and a “onchain asset” is likely to blur, not because one replaces the other, but because both evolve toward a shared goal: delivering investment exposure as efficiently and transparently as possible.
ETFs as the Benchmark for Financial Packaging
ETFs solved a powerful problem in traditional finance: how to package investment exposure in a simple, liquid, and low-cost form. They standardized access to equities, bonds, commodities, and increasingly sophisticated strategies. From an investor’s perspective, ETFs represent financial abstraction done well.
Tokens address a different, but complementary, set of constraints. They make assets programmable, transferable around the clock, and native to digital infrastructure. A token is not merely a digital wrapper, it is software that can enforce rules and move value directly.
The point of convergence becomes clear when we ask a practical question: what happens when ETF-like exposure is delivered using token-like infrastructure? Tokenization is often framed as a challenge to existing financial products. In practice, it is better understood as an infrastructure upgrade rather than a replacement. Today’s ETF ecosystem relies on multiple layers of intermediaries: custodians, transfer agents, clearing systems, and settlement processes that still operate on T+1 or T+2 timelines. Tokenized representations of fund interests, or of the underlying assets themselves, have the potential to simplify this stack.
Practically, this can translate into faster settlement, lower operational friction, atomic delivery-versus-payment, and native fractional ownership. None of these change the economic exposure an ETF provides. They change how efficiently that exposure is delivered and managed.
Where Convergence Is Already Taking Shape
Early signs of this convergence are already visible. One example is the emergence of tokenized funds and treasury products. Economically, these often resemble money market funds or ultra-short bond ETFs. Operationally, they behave like onchain assets that can be transferred, settled, or used as collateral with fewer intermediaries.
Another is the appearance of token-based wrappers that mirror existing ETF exposure. Regulatory constraints limit direct issuance in many jurisdictions, but these structures reflect growing demand for familiar investment exposure delivered through digital rails. At the same time, traditional ETFs are beginning to absorb lessons from tokenized markets. Expectations around transparency, intraday liquidity, and operational efficiency increasingly shape how ETF products are evaluated.
The Shift Toward Programmable Investment Exposure
The most significant change is not technical, but conceptual. Tokens introduce programmability into asset ownership. This opens the door to investment products where income distribution, collateral rules, and certain governance functions are enforced directly in code rather than through manual processes. As these capabilities mature, the distinction between an ETF and a token becomes less about form and more about function. What ultimately matters is not the label attached to an instrument, but the exposure it provides, the governance around it, and the trust framework that supports it.
This convergence between ETS and tokens will be shaped by regulation. ETFs benefit from well-established standards around disclosure, investor protection, and governance. Any tokenized equivalent intended for mainstream investors will need to meet similar expectations. Tokenization does not weaken these standards. In many cases, it can enhance them by making holdings, flows, and constraints more observable and verifiable in real time.
Parallel Forms, Shared Purpose
In the years ahead, ETFs are unlikely to disappear, just as tokens are unlikely to remain confined to niche markets. Instead, we are likely to see parallel forms of the same economic reality:
- traditional ETFs held through brokerage platforms,
- tokenized representations used in digital settlement environments, and
- hybrid models that bridge both.
For investors, this is not about choosing sides. It is about recognizing that the familiar investment products they rely on today are gradually evolving under the hood.
The ETF was one of the most successful financial innovations of the past thirty years. Tokens may not replace it, but they are increasingly shaping the infrastructure that carries it forward.
Jürgen Blumberg is a senior financial services executive with over two decades of experience across global markets, trading, ETFs, and blockchain-enabled capital markets. He is Chief Operating Officer at Centrifuge, where he leads operational strategy and drives institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) in decentralized finance (DeFi). In parallel, he serves as Chief Investment Officer at Anemoy, Centrifuge’s Web3-native asset manager, where he develops tokenized RWA funds using a best-in-class multi-manager approach. Centrifuge empowers asset managers to tokenize, manage, and distribute funds onchain, while giving investors access to diversified portfolios of tokenized real-world assets
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