Morgan Stanley now sees the first quarter of 2027 as the realistic point for supporting tokenised equities on its alternative trading system. Amy Oldenburg, the bank’s head of digital asset strategy, told The Block at Token2049, and in March she had pointed to the second half of 2026.
Her explanation is that client demand is limited because the products do not yet exist, and that the bank needs a little more time. It cannot support what is not there to trade.
She named two dates to watch. The DTCC’s tokenisation service launches at the end of October, which she thinks could spur activity. The GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin law, takes effect in January.
The Clarity Act, the wider market structure bill, has not passed. Oldenburg said that is acceptable, though parts of it still need to be clarified for traditional firms, along with what the Federal Reserve permits.
The bank is building its own wallet infrastructure, which is not non-custodial and is meant to be hidden from users.
It has set up a Digital Asset Lab to test technology rather than products, and it is not committing to perpetual futures or prediction markets, only to being able to support them if clients ask.
She expects the tokenised real-world asset market to land between $3 trillion and $10 trillion, which is an endorsement of other people’s forecasts rather than an estimate of her own. The date has already moved once. The interview does not say what would move it again.
