Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon has told analysts that the tokenization of financial assets is “obviously an important trend” — and argued that it is more likely to expand the bank’s trading business than shrink it. The remarks are the strongest public endorsement yet from the top of Wall Street of blockchain-based market infrastructure, and a signal to every chief executive watching the digital-asset race.
A growth story, not a threat
Solomon was speaking on the bank’s third-quarter earnings call, where an analyst pressed him on whether tokenization, decentralised finance and prediction markets could erode Goldman’s lucrative trading revenue. His answer was to reach back nearly fifty years to the arrival of electronic stock trading, which raised the same fears about Wall Street’s trading desks at the time. Goldman adapted then, he noted, and its equities business grew. “The developments are obviously creating more products, greater activity, potentially new clients, broader distribution channels,” he said. It is not the first time the bank has moved markets this month: its strategists’ bullish upgrade of global stocks to overweight drew the same kind of attention.
Building the rails already
The bank is not starting from scratch. It launched its GS DAP tokenization platform in 2022 and has since worked on tokenized bonds, money-market funds and real-estate assets, while joining a Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation tokenization pilot in July that it is now weighing at larger scale. Solomon also confirmed that Goldman supports legislation aimed at clarifying digital-asset market rules, even with reservations about some provisions. For all the ambition, he sized the business today with caution: “I’d say the activity so far is small and at the margin.”
The comments arrived alongside strong numbers — net revenue of $18.68 billion for the quarter, with equities revenue up 72 per cent year on year — and after a hot CPI report triggered an AI-stock rout earlier this month, a reminder that new financing models still carry old risks. Rival giants are moving in parallel: Wells Fargo says its tokenized-deposit system is already settling cross-border payments in two minutes or less, while Morgan Stanley sees tokenization creating new demand for wealth-management advice. Notably, Solomon announced none of the products the market keeps expecting — no Goldman-branded prediction market, no decentralised-finance vault, no agentic trading product. What investors and rival chief executives heard instead was a deliberate strategy: watch the infrastructure, participate in it, and shape it to the bank’s advantage.
