tokenization en · NOUN
Etymology
From token + -ization.
Meanings
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(countable, uncountable) The act or process of tokenizing.
Last week Wells Fargo, the country’s fourth-largest bank with about $2.3 trillion in assets, said it would offer tokenized deposits to corporate and commercial clients this fall. Not long ago, the announcement would have been written off as yet another blockchain trial balloon. Today, it looks more like keeping up with the competition. […] Tokenization is at last becoming a Wall Street business, not merely a crypto slogan. So what is tokenization, and why does it actually matter? Tokenization is a mechanism for representing an asset, or a claim on one, with a digital token on a blockchain, which is an immutable digital ledger. The asset might be a stock, Treasury bill, money market fund or bank deposit. Sometimes the token is part of the official ownership record; sometimes it is effectively a receipt for an asset held elsewhere. What tokenization changes is not the asset, but how its ownership is recorded and transferred. […] Why is tokenization gaining momentum now? Wall Street has been experimenting with tokenization for years. […] Those projects proved that one part of a transaction could operate on a blockchain. They did not create complete markets. In many cases, the asset moved on-chain while payment still arrived by bank wire, custody remained on conventional systems, and the parties reconciled their records afterward. […] The bottom line: Tokenization is no longer merely a collection of pilots, but neither is it yet the wholesale transformation of finance its promoters have promised. It can make an asset easier to transfer, but it does not make a bad investment a good one, create liquidity where none exists, or turn a wrapper into the security it tracks.
2026 August 10, Nina Bambysheva, “$5.5 Trillion Bet: Why Every Major Bank Is Racing To Put Wall Street On The Blockchain”, in Forbes:
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(countable, uncountable) An instance created by that act or process: something tokenized.
This was an unlikely tokenization of the input string.
Forms
| Spelling | Features | Labels | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| tokenizations | Number=Plur | lexicographic |