Structured products are, by design, a wrapper around an underlying. For three decades that underlying has come from a relatively fixed menu: equities, indices, interest rates, currencies, commodities. Tokenization adds a new category to that menu — and it is not a marginal one.
A tokenized asset is a digital representation of rights to an underlying asset, recorded on a distributed ledger — in Switzerland, increasingly under Article 973d of the Code of Obligations, which gives ledger-based securities clean legal status, and within FINMA's licensing perimeter for the infrastructure that issues, custodies and settles them. The underlying itself can be almost anything: short-term government debt, listed equity, private credit, real estate, infrastructure cash flows. What tokenization changes is not the asset, but its form — fractionable, transferable peer-to-peer, and capable of near-instant on-chain settlement.
Structured products are a natural place for that new form to enter the market. A capital-protected note, a participation certificate, an autocallable — none of these care, structurally, whether the reference asset trades on a stock exchange or on a regulated digital-asset venue. What they need is a reliable, observable price and a legally clean claim. Tokenized treasuries and tokenized equities already largely satisfy both. Tokenized private credit and tokenized real estate are moving in the same direction, with lock-up periods and secondary-market depth — not legal form — as the remaining constraint.
The interesting question is no longer whether tokenized assets can sit inside a structured product. It is which structures benefit most from doing so.— Dr. Verónica Pollak, C² Multiplier
Why Diversification Is the Right Frame
The case for these products should not be made on the basis of digital-asset exposure as an end in itself. It should be made on diversification — the same logic that has always justified adding a new underlying class to a structuring desk's toolkit. Tokenization expands what counts as an investable, structurable asset. Fractional interests in real estate, infrastructure financing, or private credit portfolios — historically illiquid, minimum-ticket-heavy, and difficult to reference in a listed product — become accessible as a tokenized underlying with daily or near-daily pricing.
That expansion does two things at once. It broadens the universe of risk and return profiles available to a structuring desk, and it broadens, in parallel, the universe of investors who can access those profiles — since tokenized fractions typically carry lower minimum tickets than the assets they represent. A structured note referencing a basket of tokenized infrastructure cash flows, for example, offers a return profile genuinely distinct from an equity-index-linked note — which is the entire point of adding a new asset class, rather than simply repackaging an existing one in digital form.
The Part That Changes First: the Account, Not the Product
Before the structuring desks fully catch up, the more visible shift is likely to happen one layer up — in how banks present client portfolios. The conventional account view separates deposits from securities, and increasingly carves out a separate "crypto" tab as an afterthought. That separation will not hold. As tokenized treasuries, tokenized equities and tokenized structured products move from pilot to ordinary inventory, banks and other financial-services providers will need to show deposits, traditional holdings, crypto-assets and tokenized assets within a single, coherent portfolio view — not as four separate silos, but as one broadening landscape of asset classes.
Clients will not just invest further than before. They will see their investments differently — as one expanding portfolio, not four separate accounts.— Dr. Verónica Pollak, C² Multiplier
This is not a cosmetic change. How an asset class is presented shapes how it is allocated, hedged and risk-managed. A tokenized real-estate note sitting in an unlabelled side-tab gets treated as a curiosity. The same note, integrated into the main portfolio view alongside the client's bonds and equities, gets treated as what it is: a diversification instrument competing on its own merits for a place in the allocation.
An Illustration: Royalty and Streaming Rights
Mining royalties and streaming rights are a useful illustration of the broader point, precisely because they were not built with structured products in mind. Unlike tokenized treasuries or tokenized equities — which were already liquid, structurable assets before tokenization, and to which tokenization mainly adds settlement speed and fractionability — a royalty was never designed to be referenced in a note or a basket. A royalty — a contractual claim to a percentage of a mine's production or revenue — is cash-flow generating, legally separable from the operating company, and has decades of market precedent through the listed royalty companies. What it has historically lacked is liquidity and fractionability: a single royalty stream is typically a large, illiquid, single-counterparty exposure, accessible only to specialists.
Tokenization addresses exactly that gap. The Swiss Royalty Token (SRT) framework, for instance, structures mining royalties and streaming rights as ledger-based securities under Article 973d, issued on FINMA-licensed infrastructure and held through a Swiss-regulated custodian — converting a single, illiquid royalty into a tradeable instrument with clearly encoded distribution terms. A token of this kind is, in itself, a candidate underlying: a structured note could reference a single tokenized royalty stream, or — more interestingly for diversification purposes — a basket or index spanning several tokenized royalties across commodities and jurisdictions, smoothing the single-asset and single-commodity risk that has always been the weak point of direct royalty investing. An index built across tokenized copper, lithium and gold streams, for example, would behave less like a bet on one mine and more like a diversified, cash-flow-linked exposure to the broader resources sector — exactly the kind of underlying a structuring desk could not have referenced efficiently before tokenization made the individual royalties liquid and observable.
SRT — Swiss Royalty Token. A structured Swiss advisory service for tokenizing mining royalties and streaming rights, issued on regulated infrastructure and enforceable under Swiss law.
Explore SRTWhat Stands in the Way
None of this is automatic. Custody remains the binding constraint — a tokenized underlying is only as good as the legal claim and the regulated custodian standing behind it, which is precisely why jurisdictions with a complete legal and operational stack, Switzerland among them, have a head start in originating these structures credibly. Secondary-market liquidity for tokenized private credit and real estate is still thin, which limits how aggressively a structuring desk can reference them in products that promise daily or weekly liquidity to the end investor. And regulatory treatment — how a tokenized-asset-linked structured product is classified, disclosed and distributed — is still being worked out market by market, with the SEC's recent distinction between issuer-sponsored and third-party tokenizations a useful illustration of how much definitional work remains.
The structuring industry has absorbed new underlyings before — exotic FX, structured credit, alternative indices — each time building the legal, pricing and risk infrastructure as volumes justified it. Tokenized assets are following the same path, faster, because the legal and custodial groundwork in jurisdictions like Switzerland is largely already in place.
The Frontier Is the Combination, Not the Asset
Tokenization alone does not need structured products to matter — tokenized treasuries and money-market funds already stand on their own as a yield-bearing, on-chain instrument. And structured products do not need tokenization to matter — they have diversified portfolios for decades using conventional underlyings. The frontier is what happens when the two combine: a wrapper investors already understand, built on an underlying class that did not exist in liquid, fractionable form until now. That combination is what will, in time, change not only what investors can hold, but how they see everything else they already hold alongside it.
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