The ETF industry is shifting its focus from whether tokenization will transform asset management to how quickly regulators and market infrastructure providers can make it happen.
A recent survey by Acuiti found that senior executives across ETF issuers, banks, proprietary trading firms, and institutional investors expect tokenized ETFs to become a meaningful part of the market within three to five years.
Regulatory uncertainty remains the single biggest obstacle preventing firms from moving beyond pilot projects into commercial products. The survey highlights how quickly the discussion around tokenization has evolved, with some of the world's largest asset managers and exchanges investing heavily in digital securities and blockchain-based settlement.
The results suggest that technology is no longer viewed as the biggest challenge. Instead, respondents overwhelmingly identified regulation as the primary obstacle to launching tokenized ETFs, citing legal uncertainty, operational complexity, and the difficulty of supporting both conventional and tokenized fund structures.