Kraken co-CEO: Tokenized equities are a 5-to-10 year journey, not a floodgates moment for institutions.

Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi pushed back on the idea that clearer U.S. regulation will rapidly unlock institutional demand for tokenized equities, telling The Block at Consensus 2026 that broker-dealers and banks are not about to overhaul their collateral systems overnight. "It doesn't take five months," he said. "That journey takes five to 10 years."

Kraken's xStocks product has settled roughly $5 billion onchain since launching in June 2025, but Sethi noted the bulk of current demand is coming from fintech firms and retail users in emerging markets — Mexico, Brazil, parts of Africa and Southeast Asia — rather than large U.S. financial institutions.

Sethi framed tokenized real-world assets as the next logical step in crypto's evolution — from BTC to ETH to altcoins to stablecoins — and said xStocks was deliberately built to work across wallets like MetaMask and Phantom, DEXs, and rival…