Tokenisation is a distribution problem wearing a technology costume

Every tokenisation pitch I receive starts with the chain. Which L1, which token standard, which custody integration. Those are real decisions, and they are the easy ones. In two years of running a tokenised structured-products protocol (covered-call certificates issued through a bankruptcy-remote Luxembourg SPV under Swiss law, settled on Solana and NEAR) the smart contract was never what kept me up at night. The wrapper was. Then distribution was.

The wrapper is the product

An investor who buys a tokenised certificate is not buying a token. They are buying an enforceable claim: who owes them what, under which law, ring-fenced from whose insolvency, calculated by whom. For us that meant a segregated issuer compartment, an offering memorandum, and a regulated calculation agent standing between the strategy and the NAV. None of it lives on-chain. All of it decides whether a treasurer at a serious institution can say yes.

If you can't draw your claim chain on one page (issuer, governing law, custodian, calculation agent, and what happens on default), you don't have a product yet. You have a token.

Liquidity is designed, not hoped for

I started my career on the exchange side, at a regional power exchange, writing contract specifications and running market-maker programmes. The lesson from that job transfers one-to-one: a venue with no committed liquidity providers is a website. A token is no different.

In practice there are two layers. Primary is how you execute the underlying strategy. We roll weekly derivatives against competing quotes from several tier-1 dealers, because a single counterparty will price you like a captive client. Secondary is where a holder exits. That means seeded DEX pools, a market maker on retainer with defined spread and depth obligations, and the decision nobody wants to make early: who funds the inventory.

Tokenisation does not create liquidity. It exposes illiquidity faster, twenty-four hours a day, with a public price chart.

What the chain actually buys you

It is not nothing. Done properly, on-chain issuance gives you three things traditional structured products struggle to match:

1. Settlement on the market's clock, not the back office's, with positions and flows visible to anyone who cares to check.
2. Composability. A certificate that can sit as collateral in a lending market or as one side of a pool is worth more than one that sits in a custody account.
3. Reach from one stack. The same instrument can go to an institution through RFQ and, where the rules permit, to a wallet through a DEX, from one issuance and execution stack instead of a bespoke build per client.

Every one of these is a distribution advantage. The technology is the delivery vehicle.

Five questions before you mint

Before an issuer spends money on smart-contract work, I want answers to these:

1. Who is the legal issuer, and what happens to holders if your company disappears?
2. Who calculates the NAV or the payoff, and are they regulated?
3. Who are your first ten buyers, by name, and which wrapper will their compliance teams accept?
4. Who is contractually obliged to make a market in secondary, at what spread, and who pays them?
5. What does your product's name promise, and can you deliver it in a bad quarter?

The last one sounds cosmetic. It isn't. A number in a product name reads as an implied promise, to holders and to regulators. Name the mechanism, not the outcome you hope for.

Why I'm writing this

I'm opening an independent advisory practice for issuers, funds and treasuries working on tokenised products: structure, liquidity and go-to-market. Not another white paper. The operator's view, from someone who has had to get the counsel, the dealers, the auditors and the liquidity to the same place on the same launch date.