Wall Street will operate entirely on blockchain rails by 2030, according to the founder of a Barcelona-based tokenization firm who says the technology is quietly absorbing into everyday finance.
Key Points:
- Brickken's Edwin Mata expects blockchain to underpin all of Wall Street within four years.
- He says the EU's MiCA rules price small startups out of the tokenization race.
- AI agents, not human-run dashboards, will soon decide where capital chases yield.
Brickken CEO Sees Banks Going Fully Onchain
Edwin Mata, the CEO and founder of tokenization platform Brickken, argues that industry labels like Web3 are fading as major banks fold blockchain into routine plumbing such as settlements and payments. He says the gap between Wall Street and crypto is closing fast, with blockchain merging into mainstream fintech.
"The merge between Wall Street and technology is going to dissipate," Mata said.
Institutional appetite for tokenizing real-world assets keeps climbing, helped by large moves such as BlackRock's BUIDL fund. The trend gained weight when Bullish agreed to buy Equiniti, a transfer agent for nearly 3,000 companies, in a $4.2 billion deal. That purchase, set to close in January 2027, would record share ownership directly on chain instead of through synthetic wrappers.
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Mata Bets AI Agents Will Run Finance
Brickken has steered roughly $500 million of real-world assets onchain for about 200 clients, and it is now wiring AI agents into the platform to onboard assets and source liquidity. Mata expects plain chat prompts to replace the trading dashboards in use today, with software hunting the best yields and the human decision-maker pushed aside.
Europe's MiCA Rules Draw Sharp Criticism
Mata took aim at the European Union's MiCA framework, which he says shields established banks behind costly, slow-moving compliance rules. Capital requirements under the regime run from about $58,000 for advisory work to roughly $174,000 to run a trading platform, on top of legal and audit bills. He warned that a license can take nine months, long enough to sink a young startup before it earns a cent.
Some founders may simply leave. His complaint echoes a warning from Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet, who says the rules have handed legacy finance a clear edge over native crypto firms, even pushing startups toward the UAE and Southeast Asia.
Regulators defend the framework as consumer protection, yet months of dealmaking, from BlackRock's funds to Bullish's planned Equiniti purchase, have pulled traditional markets toward the blockchain rails Mata expects to dominate by decade's end.
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