A recap of the QualitaX webinar featuring Roberto Durski, Stellar Development Foundation.
The tokenization of real-world assets has moved from theoretical promise to live production faster than most of the financial industry expected. Forecasts from institutions like Citi and Boston Consulting Group now point to anywhere between five and sixteen trillion dollars in tokenised assets by 2030 — and while the endpoints are debated, the direction is not. In a recent QualitaX webinar, Roberto Durski of the Stellar Development Foundation joined us to explore why financial institutions are choosing Stellar as their infrastructure for tokenisation, what live deployments look like in practice, and where the industry is heading.
Why Tokenisation Now? The Structural Case for Change
Roberto opened with a question that cuts to the heart of the opportunity: why does the financial industry need this at all?
The honest answer is that the infrastructure currently running global finance was designed for the constraints of the 1970s and 1980s — batch processing, overnight settlement, 9-to-5 operating windows, and a cascade of intermediaries between the original issuer and the end investor. When you buy a stock or a fund today, that transaction typically flows through an issuer, a broker, a custodian, potentially multiple sub-custodians, and a central securities depository before anything actually settles. The T+2 settlement cycle is not a law of physics — it is a legacy of the processing limitations of systems built decades ago.
The argument for tokenisation is not that financial institutions should abandon everything they have built. It is that for specific corridors, specific asset classes, and specific pain points, blockchain-native infrastructure can deliver a meaningfully better outcome: real-time settlement, 24/7 availability, fractional access, and dramatically reduced intermediary layers — without needing to rebuild the entire financial system to get there.
Roberto was direct about the realistic path to adoption: start where it matters most, accept that parallel systems will run for years, and build from proven, specific use cases rather than attempting wholesale transformation.
Why Stellar? Native Features vs. Smart Contract Layers
When evaluating which blockchain to build on, Roberto suggested financial institutions should assess two dimensions: the native features of the protocol itself, and the broader ecosystem — partners, on/off ramps, SDKs, custody solutions, and tooling — that has built up around it.
On the protocol side, Stellar was designed from the ground up for financial services. Where other blockchains expose developers to a generalised virtual machine and require smart contracts to implement financial logic, Stellar encodes the most common financial operations directly into the core protocol. These are called operations — and they read like a core banking feature list:
- Payment operations with built-in FX (path payments that allow sending in one currency and receiving in another)
- Configurable multi-signature requirements for approvals and controls
- Asset issuance and trust line management
- Compliance controls at the asset level, including authorisation requirements, freeze capabilities, and clawback
Because these features are part of the protocol core rather than an additional smart contract layer, they are extremely fast (transactions cost a fraction of a cent regardless of complexity), have been audited repeatedly by independent firms, and have been stress-tested through millions of real transactions.
The contrast with EVM-based chains is instructive. On Ethereum or Polygon, equivalent compliance controls can be implemented through ERC standards and smart contract templates — but the institution must choose which implementation to use, audit or develop the code, and accept that the financial logic runs as an additional layer on top of the settlement layer. On Stellar, it runs as a single atomic transaction at the core.
Compliance Built Into the Protocol
Roberto spent time on the compliance controls that are embedded natively into Stellar — a dimension that has proven significant in regulatory approvals for major asset issuers.
Authorisation required: An issuer can require that any holder of their asset must be explicitly approved before they can receive or trade it. This is the foundation of KYC compliance at the asset level — it means the issuer controls not just who purchases the asset initially, but who holds it at any point, including on the secondary market.
Freeze: An issuer can freeze a specific holder’s ability to transact with the asset. In practical terms, this is the mechanism for implementing a regulatory freeze order while a legal process is ongoing — without burning the asset or disrupting other holders.
Clawback: If a legal process concludes that assets were obtained improperly, the issuer can claw those assets back from a holder and either burn them or redistribute them. This feature is public — anyone can inspect what controls any issued asset carries by checking the blockchain explorer.
Roberto noted that these features being embedded natively — rather than implemented through custom smart contracts — played a meaningful role in the regulatory approval processes at the New York Department of Financial Services, the SEC for Franklin Templeton, and other regulatory interactions for asset issuers on Stellar.
Case Studies: Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, and Vun
Franklin Templeton — Benji
Franklin Templeton’s Benji product is the highest-profile tokenised fund on Stellar and arguably one of the most significant live deployments in the industry. The underlying asset is a money market fund — a well-understood, established product. What changed is the distribution and settlement model.
Traditionally, Franklin Templeton would sell fund units in bulk to retail banks, which would then distribute to their clients through their own systems. Settlement would be batched, not real-time, and yield would typically be distributed monthly. With Benji, the account and asset management moves on-chain. An end user can download the app, complete standard KYC, fund their account via Fedwire or ACH, and buy fund units — instantly, with as little as $1 — directly from Franklin Templeton. Yield accrues and is paid daily, because on-chain settlement makes the denomination of the transaction irrelevant: settling one cent is the same operation as settling a billion dollars.
The end user experience Roberto described is instructive: many users of Benji may not know they are interacting with a blockchain at all. That invisibility is precisely the point.
WisdomTree
WisdomTree is following a similar path, applying the same model to a range of fund products. Like Franklin Templeton, they represent the pattern of taking established, well-understood investment products and making them faster, cheaper, more accessible, and more transparent through on-chain issuance and settlement.
Vun (Spain)
In Europe, Vun — a Spanish partner — received approval from the Bank of Spain to enable stablecoin payments at the B2B level on Stellar. The use case is corporate treasury: using stablecoins to pay vendors and suppliers across time zones and currencies, eliminating the friction of correspondent banking for routine commercial settlements.
The Ethereum Question: Complementary, Not Competing
A question from the audience raised the issue directly: what does Stellar offer over Ethereum, particularly given that several major German bond issuances have taken place on Polygon?
Roberto’s answer was measured and worth highlighting. Stellar and Ethereum are not in direct competition for the same use case — they reflect different design tradeoffs. Ethereum and its EVM-compatible ecosystem (including Polygon) offer maximum flexibility through smart contracts, making them the right choice for complex or novel financial products that require custom logic. Stellar offers maximum performance and simplicity for the financial operations that are most common — payments, fund issuance, asset trading — because those operations are built into the protocol core.
For large financial institutions exploring tokenisation, running on multiple chains simultaneously is likely the right approach: different chains for different use cases, different ecosystems, and different regulatory environments. Mercado Bitcoin in Brazil, for example, issued assets on both Stellar and Ethereum — deliberately choosing different assets for each, to reach different audiences and test different capabilities.
On the on/off ramp dimension, Stellar has invested heavily: over 100 licensed entities provide on/off ramps globally, enabling cash access in over 180 countries through MoneyGram and other partners.
Soroban: Adding Smart Contract Flexibility to Stellar
One of the most significant near-term developments for Stellar is the launch of Soroban — a smart contract layer being added to the protocol. Roberto was clear that Soroban does not replace or undermine the core protocol design; the native operations that make Stellar fast and compliance-friendly remain the foundation. What Soroban adds is flexibility on the trading and application layer — AMMs, liquidity pools, staking mechanisms, complex DeFi-style protocols — and the ability to create more complex asset structures when the core primitives are insufficient.
Critically, Soroban was not built on the EVM. The engineering choice was Rust and WebAssembly (WASM) — the technology stack associated with mission-critical systems in aerospace and medicine, chosen specifically for reliability and performance in high-assurance applications.
The practical implication Roberto drew out: once Soroban is live, financial institutions that chose Ethereum partly for its smart contract flexibility will have the option to implement equivalent logic natively on Stellar.
Interoperability: A Work in Progress
Interoperability between blockchain networks — and between blockchain networks and legacy financial infrastructure — remains one of the most consequential unsolved problems in the industry. Fragmented liquidity across isolated chains will constrain the growth of the entire tokenisation market if it is not addressed.
Roberto was candid: we are still a long way from streamlined cross-chain interoperability. Stellar is working with partners including xLR8r, Polygon CDK, and Hyperledger on specific corridors — an Ethereum-Stellar bridge is already live, and Hyperledger integration is in progress. Stellar has also run pilots on ISO 20022 compatibility with ecosystem partners.
The practical advice Roberto offered echoes the broader message of the conversation: focus on the corridors and use cases that matter most, accept that full interoperability will take time, and build toward it incrementally rather than waiting for a universal solution that does not yet exist.
Key Takeaways
- Tokenisation is live, not theoretical: Franklin Templeton’s Benji, WisdomTree’s funds, and B2B stablecoin payments in Spain are in production today — delivering real improvements in settlement speed, distribution reach, and investor access
- Stellar’s native protocol design — with compliance controls (authorisation, freeze, clawback), payment operations, and multi-signature built into the core — offers financial institutions a fast, audited, and regulator-familiar foundation for asset issuance
- The right starting point for any financial institution is a specific, commercially meaningful corridor or use case — not a wholesale infrastructure replacement
- Ethereum and Stellar are complementary: different design tradeoffs make them suitable for different use cases; running on multiple chains simultaneously is a rational strategy
- Soroban — Stellar’s new Rust/WASM smart contract layer — adds the flexibility needed for complex financial products without compromising the core protocol’s performance
- Interoperability remains the critical open challenge: liquidity fragmentation across chains will limit market growth; cross-chain bridges and ISO 20022 pilots are in progress but the problem is not yet solved
- The end goal is both ends of the transaction on-chain: tokenised payment assets (stablecoins, deposit tokens, CBDCs) and tokenised securities settling against each other in real time — that convergence is the infrastructure of the next generation of capital markets