Tokenizing an asset and making it tradable are two different things. People keep collapsing them.
Putting a bond on-chain gives you a clean digital representation. It doesn't give you anyone to sell it to. Liquidity isn't a property of the token it's a property of the market around it: enough buyers, enough sellers, market makers willing to quote both sides, all showing up in the same place at the same time. You can't code that into a contract. It's a coordination problem, and coordination problems don't care how good your infrastructure is.
Regulated assets make it harder, not easier. Eligibility rules who's allowed to hold this, in which jurisdiction, under what checks deliberately shrink the pool of possible buyers. That's the point of compliance, but it's also a tax on liquidity. And when the same asset ends up split across chains and venues, you get ten shallow pools instead of one deep one. Fragmentation is how tokenized markets die.
The only lever infrastructure has is concentration one venue, shared composability, assets that can actually move to where the demand is. That's the bet behind something like Dusk Trade: aggregate flow instead of scattering it.
I stay skeptical. This is a cold-start problem, and standards don't solve cold starts issuers, eligible buyers, and market makers all arriving together do. Who's it for? Issuers who arrive with their own demand. Build the venue and they still might not come.
At first I assumed "settled" is doing a lot of work in most blockchain pitches.
On a typical chain, a transaction isn't final the moment it lands. It's probably final and it becomes more probable as blocks pile on top. That's why exchanges make you wait for confirmations: they're waiting for the odds of a reorg to fall close enough to zero. For sending tokens between friends, fine. For settling a securities trade, that's a legal problem, not a UX one. In regulated markets, settlement finality is a defined moment the point where a transfer is irrevocable and recognized as final in law. "Very unlikely to reverse" doesn't satisfy that. Either the trade is final or it isn't.
So chains reaching for institutions face an awkward choice. Wait dozens of confirmations and call it settlement slow, and still probabilistic. Or appoint a trusted operator to declare when things are final which quietly puts the intermediary back in the middle of the thing you were trying to disintermediate.
Deterministic finality is the less glamorous answer. Once consensus finalizes a block, it's final no rollback, no waiting game. That maps to what the law actually asks for, which is why it matters more than throughput numbers here.
I'd still want to see it survive contention and hold up when a regulator asks "is this final?" But the design instinct is right. For securities, finality isn't a probability. It's a yes or no.