Business Cash Moves Onchain, Pressuring Banks and Leveling Playing Field

This shift is being accelerated by new integrations, including a new partnership between Stable Sea and WisdomTree to offer tokenized money market funds (MMFs) to small and medium-sized businesses. 

WisdomTree is an asset manager that currently has nearly $160bn in assets under management, while Stable Sea is a fintech company that focusses on letting teams move capital via stablecoins. 

The new integration will allow companies to invest operating cash into the asset manager's tokenized Treasury funds, starting with the WisdomTree Treasury Money Market Digital Fund (WTGXX), directly through Stable Sea's platform. 

As of 30 Apr, WTGXX holds $867mn in assets, up 5% over the past month, and pays an annualised yield of 3.5% under a management fee of 0.25%. 

Tokenization is the process of representing real-world assets (RWA) as digital tokens on a blockchain, enabling them to be traded and transferred in real time. The move comes as tokenized versions of US Treasury and MMFs have grown to more than $15bn in assets, up 13% in the past month alone. 

A simpler process

Cash management has long been "a tale of two markets," with large corporates able to deploy idle funds through sweep accounts, money market funds and repo markets, Tanner Taddeo, CEO of Stable Sea, told Sandmark. By contrast, "small and mid-sized businesses have been stuck with checking accounts that pay close to nothing," as the cost of moving cash into higher-return instruments often outweighs the benefits for the banks serving them.

By turning to tokenization, this system collapses operational costs and "consumerizes" treasury cash management. "The same way Robinhood made retail brokerage feel like a tap, tokenized MMFs let SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) treat yield as default behavior rather than an active decision," he said. 

When MMFs sit on the same rails as a company's working capital, moving idle cash into yield becomes simpler, Taddeo explained. "That changes who can compete for SMB cash," he said. "It's no longer just JPMorgan and BlackRock; it's any platform that already holds the customer's operating balance and can offer yield as a feature rather than a separate product."

From yield to movement

The broader shift here is not just about yield, but also how money moves. 

Traditional MMFs offer yield, but come with limits like longer settlement times. However, with tokenized MMFs that settle 24/7, yield-bearing cash and operational cash become the same pool of money – reducing the need for companies to manage separate buckets for liquidity and returns.

"That's the change. You stop maintaining separate buckets for 'cash I might need' and 'cash I'm trying to grow' because the trade-off disappears," Taddeo said. 

If this shift becomes broadly adopted, much of today's treasury work, from forecasting cash to timing transfers, could become obsolete. "The job changes from moving money between buckets to managing risk and counterparty exposure," Taddeo added. "That's a bigger shift than the basis points."

What about banks?

Taddeo predicts that if this model scales, banks are unlikely to disappear, but their role in cash management could narrow. 

"Banks don't go away; they specialize," the CEO said. "The business of holding undifferentiated operating cash and paying nothing for it is the part that gets competed away."

Instead, banks would likely focus on areas where they still have an advantage, including lending and credit, complex foreign exchange and cross-border services.

"The interesting question isn't whether banks survive; they will, but which banks lean into being infrastructure for tokenized rails versus which try to defend the old margin pool," Taddeo said. "The ones already partnering with tokenization platforms and stablecoin issuers are making the right bet."

Over time, the shift may also become less about where cash sits and more about how it is used. Taddeo said most corporate cash is still likely to remain with banks in the near term, but a growing share – potentially 15% to 30% of working capital – could move into tokenized funds and onchain systems. 

"The more interesting prediction isn't about location. It's that the distinction between 'cash at the bank' and 'cash on-chain' is no longer meaningful to most CFOs," he added. "The treasurer of 2031 will care about yield, liquidity, and counterparty risk and won't think about which rail it's on any more than today's treasurer thinks about ACH versus Fedwire."

The rise of RWAs

The move comes as tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) scale rapidly across markets, more than tripling since 2025 to reach $19.3bn by the end of the first three months of 2026, according to CoinGecko.

Tokenized Treasuries remain the largest segment and added roughly $9bn (a 225% increase) over the past 15 months, driving more than half of the sector's growth.

Commodities rose to $5.5bn, largely driven by gold-backed tokens. This came as trading activity also accelerated, with spot volumes in tokenized gold reaching nearly $91bn in the first quarter of 2026 alone.