Avalanche Tokenization Surges to $1.34bn on Institutional Deployments

Avalanche's combined represented and distributed asset value stands at $1.34bn as of 19 May, according to RWA.xyz.

"You can't run 21st-century finance on 1970s plumbing forever," Vande Woude said in an interview with Sandmark at the Bermuda Digital Finance Forum. She previously covered small and mid-cap banks in equity research at T. Rowe Price, one of the largest US asset managers with more than $1.5tn in assets under management.

Legacy systems exposed

During her time in equity research, Vande Woude observed persistent inefficiencies at community banks.

"Many of the community banks in particular are still running on legacy, COBOL-based infrastructure," she explained. COBOL is an outdated programming language from the 1950s, still used in core banking systems to process transactions in batches overnight.

She highlighted problems with separate ledgers that do not communicate, large reconciliation teams to fix discrepancies and slow settlement cycles such as T+3 (trade date plus three business days).

"I got very excited about blockchain not replacing banks, but really replacing the patchwork of intermediaries that they've been duct-taping together since the 1970s," Vande Woude added.

Avalanche stood out to her for its institutional-grade performance, including sub-second finality and customizable subnets. These are purpose-built blockchains that institutions can tailor for their specific compliance and performance needs.

Distribution is the real moat

Vande Woude stressed that technology maturity now outpaces the harder challenge of reaching end users.

"The tokenization tech stack has really matured faster than anyone expected," she noted. "The hard part is never minting a token. It's really asking the question of who is going to buy that, where is the utility going to be derived."

She pointed to B2B2C models – business-to-business-to-consumer strategies in which tokenized products are integrated into existing fintech apps that already serve everyday users. This approach makes blockchain invisible to end customers. A key example is OpenTrade, a yield-as-a-service platform on Avalanche. It allows neobanks – digital-only banks such as Colombia's Lulo or Argentina's Buenbit – to offer US dollar yield products via a single API integration.

"A worker in Bogotá can end up with the same dollar yield product as a private wealth client in Manhattan," Vande Woude said. "That's what tokenization is for, is really unlocking that access."

Avalanche functions as the settlement layer for major institutions, including BlackRock (the world's largest asset manager), Franklin Templeton, KKR, Apollo, Janus Henderson and Wellington Management. These firms have issued tokenized products on the public C-Chain for shared liquidity and composability – the ability for different onchain applications to interact seamlessly.

Live deployments, investor implications

Recent production examples include Broadridge Financial Solutions, which handles about 80% of US proxy voting. It extended its governance platform to a dedicated Avalanche Layer 1 for onchain corporate actions. Galaxy Digital, a crypto financial services firm, will use it for its shareholder vote on 28 May.

Tassat Group – a New York-based provider of blockchain infrastructure for regulated financial institutions that has settled more than $2.5tn in transactions to date – upgraded its Lynq real-time settlement and collateral network to Avalanche. The platform connects more than 30 institutions, including FalconX, Fireblocks and Galaxy.

Intain – a structured finance platform specializing in asset-backed securities administration and tokenization – has tokenized roughly $430mn in asset-backed securities on Avalanche. Its platform enables about 2,000 community banks to access institutional capital markets through a partnership with FIS, a global financial technology provider serving thousands of banks worldwide.

For investors, these developments mean faster settlement, reduced intermediary costs and broader access to yield-bearing products. Vande Woude expects regulatory tailwinds to accelerate staffing and deployments over the next 12–24 months.

"The index fund opened Wall Street to Main Street, and I think tokenization opens Wall Street to everyone else," she concluded.

Chainalysis researchers, in their April 2026 analysis of tokenized RWAs, noted that many illiquid assets such as real estate lack continuous secondary market trading, making valuations difficult to measure precisely and illustrating broader liquidity challenges in the sector.