Morgan Stanley, the $2 trillion Wall Street bank, has forecast that the market for tokenized assets will grow to $10 trillion by 2030, according to research reported by CoinGape.

The projection is one of the more aggressive estimates to come from a major global bank, and it lands as tokenization shifts from conference talking point to balance-sheet pilot. Morgan Stanley's call matters less as a number than as a signal: when a bank of that scale puts a decade-end figure on a market, desks start building for it.

What does the forecast actually cover?

Tokenized assets are conventional instruments — bonds, funds, money market products, real estate claims — issued or represented as on-chain tokens, typically under standards like ERC-20 on Ethereum and its layer-2 networks. The $10 trillion figure refers to the total value of such assets outstanding by 2030, not trading volume.

The forecast implies a steep expansion from the current market, which remains small relative to traditional fixed income and fund structures. Getting from here to $10 trillion requires issuers to move beyond pilots and into routine issuance — a transition that depends on custody infrastructure, secondary-market liquidity and regulatory clarity in the largest capital-markets jurisdictions.

Why a bank forecast carries weight here

Morgan Stanley is not a neutral observer. The bank already operates in digital-asset markets, and asset tokenization threatens and opportunities its core businesses at the same time. Issuance, settlement and custody are fee lines that tokenization can compress or capture.

A $10 trillion market would reshape post-trade economics. Settlement that currently takes T+1 or T+2 in traditional rails can settle near-instantly on-chain, cutting counterparty exposure and freeing collateral. That's the operational case banks keep making, and it's the reason projections like this one keep getting sharper.

What stands between today and $10 trillion?

The gap between forecast and reality sits in three places:

• Regulatory frameworks — issuers need clear treatment of tokenized securities in the US and EU before scaling issuance.
• Liquidity — tokenized assets need secondary markets deep enough for institutional portfolios to enter and exit at size.
• Infrastructure maturity — institutional custody, on-chain identity and interoperability standards are still being hardened.

Morgan Stanley is not alone in its optimism. Other large financial institutions have published similar long-horizon estimates for tokenization, though the $10 trillion by 2030 figure sits at the upper end of the range. When banks disagree, they disagree on timing, not direction.

What happens next?

The forecast gives asset managers and market infrastructure providers a planning horizon. Watch whether major issuers follow through with scaled tokenized bond and fund issuance over the next 12 to 24 months — that will determine whether the 2030 number stays a projection or becomes a benchmark the industry is measured against.