Morgan Stanley pushes tokenized stock trading to Q1 2027, saying the products and demand are not there yet

Morgan Stanley now expects to support tokenized equities on its alternative trading system in the first quarter of 2027, later than the second half of 2026 it had previously discussed. The bank's head of digital asset strategy, Amy Oldenburg, gave the new timing in an interview reported by The Block on October 12 and relayed by outlets including Forklog. We could not open The Block's original article, so the details below rest on those secondary reports, which agree with one another.

What the reasoning was

According to the reports, the delay comes down to supply and demand rather than technology: the trading venue needs tokenized products to list, those products do not yet exist in volume, and so client demand has not formed. That is a candid description of where the market is, and it sits awkwardly beside coverage that framed the news as a sign that Wall Street is "all in".

Oldenburg also said she expects the tokenized real-world-asset market to reach $3 trillion to $10 trillion by 2030, as CoinCentral reported from conference interviews. That is a projection from one bank's executive, not a measured figure, and the market today is a small fraction of it. We did not independently confirm a current market size in this report, so we are not stating one.

The infrastructure piece to watch

The more concrete date is not Morgan Stanley's. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation said in a May 4, 2026 press release that it planned initial limited production trades in July 2026 and a launch of its tokenization service in October 2026. If that service goes live on schedule, it is the plumbing that banks like Morgan Stanley would connect to, which is why timing on the bank's side tends to follow it. We have not confirmed whether the October launch has happened.

What it means

For traders, the useful reading is narrow. A large bank is still building, and has put a date on it, but the first-half-of-2027 timeline means no tokenized equity trading from Morgan Stanley this year. Delays of this kind are common in new market infrastructure and are not evidence that the project is abandoned. Equally, they are a reminder that announcements and live products are different things. Tokenized stock projects have been announced across the industry in recent weeks, and we have been tracking the ones that come with actual terms, such as Securitize's launch on Solana.

One claim circulating alongside this news, that a bank has begun custody of Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin for use as collateral on a trading platform, we could not verify from the sources we found, so we are leaving it out.

Sources: Forklog (citing The Block); CoinCentral; DTCC press release. Information, not investment advice.