Why Tokenization on Public Blockchains Beats CBDC Asset Platforms

Central bank digital currency platforms like Project mBridge create walled gardens. They solve for interbank settlement but fail to unlock composable financial markets.\n- No Secondary Markets: Tokenized assets are trapped in permissioned ledgers, preventing price discovery.\n- Developer Lockout: Innovation is gated by central bank committees, not open-source competition.

Institutions are bypassing permissioned systems to issue directly on public chains like Stellar and Polygon. This taps into a global, 24/7 liquidity pool.\n- Instant Settlement: T+0 vs. the traditional T+2 cycle, freeing up capital.\n- Programmable Yield: Bonds can be automatically reinvested via DeFi protocols like Aave or Compound.

Traditional private markets have multi-year lock-ups and opaque ownership. Transferring a property share requires notaries, lawyers, and months of paperwork.\n- Fragmented Registry: Ownership records are siloed across jurisdictions and custodians.\n- High Minimums: Access is restricted to accredited investors, limiting the investor base.

Platforms tokenize property deeds on Ethereum or Base, enabling micro-ownership and instant peer-to-peer trading.\n- Global Liquidity Pool: A homeowner in Miami can sell a stake to a buyer in Singapore in ~15 seconds.\n- Transparent Ledger: All ownership, liens, and rental income distributions are immutably recorded onchain.

A shipment of coffee from Brazil to Germany involves dozens of intermediaries, paper bills of lading, and manual reconciliation. This creates fraud risk and delays payment by weeks.\n- Document Forgery: Paper-based systems are vulnerable, costing the industry billions annually.\n- Capital Inefficiency: Goods are in transit, but financing is stalled by paperwork.

Networks built on R3 Corda or public EVM chains tokenize letters of credit and bills of lading, creating a single source of truth.\n- Immutable Audit Trail: Every step from origin to port is logged, reducing fraud to near-zero.\n- Instant Financing: Tokenized invoices can be used as collateral in DeFi money markets within minutes, not months.

CBDC platforms are isolated ledgers, creating asset silos. Public chains like Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon are natively composable with DeFi.

• Instant Composability: Tokenized assets can be used as collateral on Aave or traded on Uniswap upon issuance.
• Network Effects: Tap into an existing $50B+ DeFi TVL ecosystem versus building liquidity from zero.

CBDC rails are inherently centralized and subject to political and regulatory blacklisting. Public blockchains provide credible neutrality.

• Unstoppable Settlement: Transactions cannot be reversed by a single entity, ensuring finality for high-value assets.
• Permissionless Innovation: Anyone can build on the base layer, preventing platform capture by incumbents.

CBDC platforms require bespoke, expensive infrastructure. Public chains offer battle-tested, open-source code with established security assumptions.

• Lower Dev Cost: Use existing ERC-20, ERC-721 standards and tooling (OpenZeppelin, Hardhat).
• Proven Security: Leverage $100B+ in secured value and years of adversarial testing versus an untested private chain.

Critics cite fragmentation across L1/L2s as a weakness. For asset tokenization, it's a strategic advantage enabling regulatory and risk segmentation.

• Regulatory Arbitrage: Issue EU-compliant bonds on one chain and US-compliant funds on another, bridged via LayerZero or Axelar.
• Risk Isolation: A bug on one appchain doesn't collapse the entire tokenized asset ecosystem.

Launching on a CBDC platform requires navigating bureaucratic approval cycles. Public chain deployment is governed by code.

• Weeks, Not Years: Deploy a tokenized treasury bill pilot on Polygon in weeks versus a multi-year CBDC sandbox project.
• Real-World Proof: Ondo Finance, Maple Finance, and Centrifuge already manage billions in tokenized RWAs today.

CBDCs often tout advanced privacy, but this is achievable on public chains with zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs, Aztec, Zcash).

• Selective Disclosure: Prove compliance (e.g., accredited investor status) without revealing full identity.
• Superior Model: Combine public auditability of supply with private transactions, unlike opaque central bank ledgers.