BlackRock Cites Price Data as Weak Link in Tokenized Asset Push

Failures in price data during a market disruption on 10 Oct 2025 serve as evidence that the infrastructure of the industry is not yet ready to support tokenized markets at scale, Samara Cohen, senior managing director and global head of market development at BlackRock, noted during the Digital Assets Summit on 25 Mar.

The "oracle problem" is a key learning from the multiple points of failure in pricing sources and data that led to cascading events on 10 Oct, Cohen explained.

Pricing data underpins trading, valuation and risk management across markets. That information is often delivered through oracles, which pull external price data onchain so smart contracts and trading systems can act on it within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Failures in those systems can quickly propagate across participants.

Prices diverged across cryptocurrency venues as liquidity collapsed during the crash in October, and those discrepancies fed into margin engines and liquidation systems to help trigger a record $19bn cascade of forced liquidations.

A much broader impact on investor trust and commitment to the space would have occurred if the events of 10 Oct had happened with the tokenization of financial markets at a large scale, Cohen added. While traditional finance executives love to preach the gospel of blockchain efficiency, a $19bn liquidation cascade tends to sober up the room quite rapidly.

The next phase of asset tokenization

How new systems perform under stress as they scale will define what comes next for tokenization as a range of tokenized securities and payment models are expected to launch in the US over the next six to 12 months, according to Cohen.

Demand is emerging for tokenized versions of traditional assets including money market funds, bonds and equities accessed through digital wallets, she said.

Tokenization is moving into exchange-traded funds as a core product for BlackRock. Tokenization is the next chapter in the ETF story, Cohen noted. The asset manager is behind several cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds including the iShares Bitcoin Trust which currently holds more than $54bn in Bitcoin.

The company has already moved into the space with its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund or BUIDL, which operates as a tokenized money market fund that issues cryptocurrency tokens backed by US Treasuries and cash equivalents while currently holding over $121bn in assets.

Building that full picture requires ETFs, ETPs and tokenization as critical components, Cohen said.

Reworking the core infrastructure rails

The attention of financial institutions is shifting to the infrastructure needed to support those markets as large-scale adoption approaches.

The shift to blockchain-based finance will require reworking core infrastructure rather than replacing it, particularly in how markets handle settlement, Tom Zschach, chief innovation officer at SWIFT, explained during a separate panel at the event.

Roles such as correspondent banking, foreign exchange and holding balances across jurisdictions would all go away if instant settlement could be done on a stablecoin, he said. Banks will certainly still be involved, but they will have to think of other ways to monetize that flow, he added.

Swift is a Belgium-based global messaging network used by more than 11,000 financial institutions to send payment instructions across borders, and it is already moving to adapt its infrastructure to that shift. The network is developing a blockchain-based shared ledger to support tokenized assets and stablecoins while testing how digital and traditional assets can move across the same rails.

Connecting new rails rather than replacing existing ones is the ultimate goal, Zschach said. Composability is the whole idea, so the network can connect to the new settlement locations that banks want to reach, he concluded.