“The next generation for markets, the next generation for securities, will be the Tokenization of securities.” Larry Fink said that in 2022. Three years later, BlackRock runs a tokenized fund on Ethereum, Nasdaq is wiring stablecoin settlement into its infrastructure, and $9 billion in fund AUM has moved on-chain. The architecture of capital markets is changing, and advisors who understand the shift will be better positioned to explain it to clients.
CoinShares calls this convergence Hybrid Finance: the gradual rewiring of capital markets onto public blockchain rails. This guide maps what that means for advisor portfolios today.
Three structural forces are driving the shift.
First, settlement infrastructure. Stablecoins now represent a $300B+ market cap settling global transactions 24/7. Ethereum and Solana are the dominant institutional settlement layers, with Ethereum alone securing roughly $180B in stablecoin supply. For advisors, these are the rails on which the next generation of financial products will run.
Second, tokenized real-world assets. Tokenized fund AUM reached $9B in Q1 2026, up 181% year-over-year. US Treasuries and private credit lead adoption, with BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Ondo among the primary issuers. Tokenized stocks, barely a rounding error a year ago at $27.6M, reached $773M in Q1 2026: a 2,697% increase. The technology is operational at institutional scale.
Third, revenue-generating on-chain applications. A growing cohort of on-chain protocols now generates real, recurring fee revenue, with transparent financials and built-in buyback mechanisms that make them analyzable through familiar public markets frameworks. Hyperliquid alone generated $178.7M in Q1 2026 revenue, comparable to many regulated exchanges.
What this guide covers
CoinShares’ Hybrid Finance guide walks advisors through each pillar — settlement infrastructure, the tokenized asset landscape, and the emerging class of cash-flow-generating protocols with data, context, and a clear framework for explaining this shift to clients. It also addresses how regulated digital asset products providing exposure to these themes differ fundamentally from speculative altcoin bets.
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