Every digital economy wants speed, automation, and cleaner data flows, but the operating reality is rougher. Payments pass through slow settlement windows, data sits inside closed systems, and permissions break when workflows cross platforms.
Most discussions of tokenization end at the asset class level. The more useful question is what happens to infrastructure when an asset, a credential, or a data object becomes programmable and moves with rules attached to it.
The Bank for International Settlements defines tokenization as recording claims on real or financial assets onto a programmable platform, where the token itself carries information and functionality.
Southeast Asia is a good example. ASEAN cross-border QR payments hit 36.2 million transactions worth US$716.4 million in 2025 on shared rails and common standards. Daily use turned a technical project into working infrastructure, and users feel the speed and reliability without seeing the machinery behind them.
Africa, in turn, shows one of the world’s strongest mobile-money adoption stories, with transaction volume reaching about $1.43 trillion in 2025, up 27 percent from 2024. The continent also accounted for roughly 66 percent of global mobile money transaction value and 74 percent of global transaction volume, with around 92 billion mobile money transactions recorded in 2025.
Why digital systems still struggle to agree
Most digital systems don’t break because one database is weak. They strain because many parties need to agree on the same state.
A bank sees one record, a merchant sees another. A logistics provider, software platform, regulator, and customer may each hold their own version of the same event, which produces delay, reconciliation work, and disputes over status and timing.
Tokenization addresses this at the asset layer. A token can represent ownership, a claim, a payment right, or a compliance condition. The asset becomes easier to move because it carries more context, and downstream systems no longer have to rebuild the same logic from scratch.
The same architecture can apply to identity, supply chains, software access, IoT networks, and enterprise workflows – anywhere data and rights need to travel across systems without losing meaning.
This is especially relevant in African markets, where the gap is often not demand, but coordination. People already use mobile wallets, merchants already accept digital value, and informal asset markets already move at scale. The missing layer is often trusted infrastructure that can make ownership, transfer, collateral, and settlement easier to verify across parties.
Rules move closer to the asset
The most useful part of tokenization is that the asset can carry logic. A token can move only under certain conditions, expose selected data, or trigger a workflow once a requirement is met.
Tokenization is one approach in current market infrastructure work for placing issuance, trading, settlement, and custody inside one digital environment, with smart contracts handling the automation of coupon payments and compliance checks.
This logic isn’t limited to securities. A SaaS license can carry usage rights, an IoT device credential can carry ownership and maintenance status, and a digital identity claim can carry proof without exposing every underlying document.
The W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model 2.0 shows the same idea applied to identity, giving issuers, holders, and verifiers a standard way to express claims that can be protected from tampering and exchanged across parties.
Product data is moving in a similar direction. The Consumer Goods Forum’s QR Code Implementation Guideline highlights the move toward GS1 Digital Link. One standardized 2D code can combine a checkout identifier with a secure web address for richer product data. This can include digital product passports.
The principle is the same across these cases. Systems coordinate better when the object itself carries context, verification, and permissions.
Standards are where the value builds
A token without standards is a digital wrapper. A token inside a shared framework becomes part of a network.
BIS Project Nexus is designed to standardize how domestic instant payment systems connect across borders. An earlier BIS paper outlined how this could deliver international payments to the recipient within 60 seconds, working through reliable connections between systems that already exist.
Tokenization is reaching a similar stage in market infrastructure. Singapore’s Project Guardian has been running institutional pilots for tokenized assets since 2022. In Europe, issuers have placed close to €4 billion in DLT-based fixed-income instruments since 2021.
LSEG announced plans in February 2026 to build an on-chain settlement capability through its Digital Securities Depository, intended to support tokenized bonds, equities, and private market instruments across blockchain networks.
The token becomes useful when it works as a common interface across institutions, platforms, custodians, compliance teams, and users.
Auditability has to be built in
Automation only helps when parties can verify what happened. If ownership is unclear, custody is weak, or records cannot be audited, tokenization gives old problems a new format.
Regulators are already focused on this. IOSCO has pointed to legal, operational, technology, credit, and liquidity risks in tokenized markets. That scrutiny should sharpen the infrastructure work rather than slow it down. Tokenized systems need legal clarity, secure custody, strong key management, and compliance logic that holds up across jurisdictions.
The same approach is seen outside finance. Security becomes expensive when it is added late, and compliance becomes fragile when it depends on manual reporting and separate databases.
A stronger system makes the asset state easier to verify by design, keeping permissions, records, and lifecycle rules close to the object. That may be tokenization’s most practical lesson: trust shouldn’t depend on screenshots, spreadsheet exports, or delayed reconciliation.
Tokenization’s infrastructure case is not finance-only
Finance is the first large arena because the pain is obvious: settlement, custody, liquidity, and reconciliation all carry real costs. The architecture has wider use. Supply chains need object-level traceability. Identity systems need verifiable credentials, IoT networks need device permissions tied to ownership and maintenance, and enterprise platforms need access rights that survive across vendors, APIs, and business units.
The African continent has a young, mobile-first population, with more than 400 million people aged 15 to 35. It also has large informal resource economies. Artisanal and small-scale mining provides essential livelihoods, supplies notable shares of global cobalt and gold, and remains largely informal.
That is where tokenization becomes more than a capital-markets tool. For gold, minerals, agricultural products, carbon credits, identity credentials, or merchant receivables, the same logic applies. The asset needs a clearer record. The holder needs a verifiable claim. The buyer, lender, or platform needs a way to trust the state of that asset without building a separate verification process each time.
Tokenization gives these systems a modular design language. The asset or data object becomes easier to verify, move, and govern. In our work on asset-backed tokenization, one point has stayed consistent. People adopt infrastructure when it removes friction. The token is the means, not the reason.
The strongest tokenization projects will feel quiet from the outside. They sit behind treasury workflows, merchant payments, identity checks, and software permissions. In Africa, they may also sit behind informal-to-formal asset pathways, local savings behavior, cross-border trade, and new collateral models for people and businesses that have long been underserved by traditional rails.
Users may never think about the token, just as they rarely think about messaging standards or settlement rails today.
Tokenization’s future depends on what it fixes
Companies don’t need to tokenize everything. They need to find the places where systems lose trust, time, and coordination: duplicated records, partners disagreeing on asset status, compliance that depends on after-the-fact reporting, and workflows that stall because permission cannot travel.
As for Africa, those places sit in informal gold and mineral markets, fragmented trade corridors, volatile local-currency environments, or financial systems with mobile money scaling faster than many formal rails. The continent doesn’t need tokenization as a trend. It needs infrastructure that can make real assets easier to verify, finance, transfer, and govern.
Tokenization works best when an asset, claim, or credential needs to move across a network with verifiable rights and predictable rules. Early adoption means designing data and asset models with auditability, permissions, interoperability, and lifecycle logic from the start, with lifecycle rules in place before they are needed.
Tokenization works as infrastructure, or it doesn’t work at all. Bolted onto existing systems as a feature, it adds another layer to manage. Designed in from the start, it removes layers – which is the only reason to do it.
Mamadou Kwidjim Toure is CEO & Founder of Ubuntu Tribe. He spent over 20 years at major institutions like KPMG, BNP Paribas, and IBM, where he managed transactions worth over $25 billion across African infrastructure, mining, and technology. As a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Mamadou advocates for using technology to drive sustainable prosperity in emerging markets.
TNGlobal INSIDER publishes contributions relevant to entrepreneurship and innovation. You may submit your own original or published contributions subject to editorial discretion.
Featured image: Pachon in Motion on Pexels
Rethinking the future of 5G through the lens of extended reality (XR)