The pitch you’ve heard for tokenized funds in every BlackRock and Franklin press release for two years is basis points. Faster settlement, cheaper transfer agency, fewer reconciliation steps, smaller spread between fund NAV and trading price. At Consensus 2026 in Miami we sat down with David Kroger, Director of Digital Asset Research at T. Rowe Price, and the pitch he gave was almost the opposite.
“Maybe something that’s overhyped is the immediate operational efficiency,” he said. “There’ll be a learning curve where you’re going to end up watching the blockchain transactions and in-house transactions together, and then over time, as the technology has proven trustworthy and verifiable, will shift over. But that’ll take time, rather than an immediate switch.”
What’s actually delivering in 2026, by his read, is something more boring and more useful: access. The firms tokenization wins for in 2026 are the ones that previously couldn’t get on-chain because compliance wouldn’t approve it and the CEO wouldn’t sponsor it. That changed because the stack underneath got mature enough that institutional underwriters could sign off, not because the per-transaction cost dropped.
Not many people inside the largest U.S. asset managers are saying that on the record.
Who Kroger Is
Kroger is the internal valuation analyst whose work underwrites asset selection on T. Rowe’s pending TKNZ Active Crypto ETF. T. Rowe CIO Justin Thomson has publicly credited him for adapting a traditional discounted cash flow framework to use staking rewards as the cash flow input. His background is data science before equity research: Loup Ventures under Gene Munster, CBDC work at Piper Sandler, the Ethereum Merge desk at Cowen, then StoneX, then T. Rowe. The customer-facing voices on the firm’s digital assets work are Head of Digital Assets Blue Macellari and Global Head of Trading Strategy Matt Howell; Kroger is the bench seat.
Quotes below are lightly edited; the underlying audio came off a Consensus floor and reads accordingly. The interview is point-in-time: regulatory timing, TKNZ approval status, and token prices named here will move.
The Access Trade Is the Real 2026 Win
Kroger’s full answer to the question of where tokenization is actually delivering:
“The wins right now are firms that are buying up and partnering up with other layers of the stack that are beginning to offer a full suite of ability for a firm that is not crypto-native or crypto-inclined to get on-chain. Or that compliance is comfortable with, and that the CEO is excited about, and that lets them access markets they hadn’t thought about before. And that was before the discussions about operational efficiency.”
The story most tokenization platforms tell their investors is that institutions are coming on-chain because it’s cheaper. Kroger’s read is that institutions are coming on-chain because they finally can: the custody is OCC-chartered, the transfer agency is plugged into the right systems, the legal opinion is written, the CEO has a slide deck that doesn’t terrify the board.
That matches what the largest tokenized money market funds look like in practice. BlackRock’s BUIDL sat at roughly $2.85B in February 2026 and now runs across eight chains, with the majority of AUM on chains other than Ethereum. Franklin’s BENJI is at ~$1.98B across nine chains, with over $211M of cumulative peer-to-peer transfer volume per RWA.xyz data. WisdomTree’s WTGXX got SEC approval for 24/7 trading in February 2026. The tokenized MMF category sat at roughly $8.6B in November 2025, up around 110% year-over-year.
What none of those numbers prove is that anyone is meaningfully cheaper to operate. They prove that more institutions are willing to put real capital onto chains they couldn’t previously underwrite. That’s the access trade, and Kroger named it before he was asked to.
The operational-efficiency story will eventually be true. The dual-ledger phase he describes, with on-chain and in-house systems running in parallel, is what’s actually happening today at every shop that’s serious about this. Until one side or the other can be retired, the headcount savings the consultant decks promise stay theoretical.
The Vault Conditional for 2031
Asked how much of T. Rowe’s fund complex would be on-chain in some form by 2031, Kroger gave the only forward-looking answer that’s worth quoting:
“If vaults become the instrument that replaces ETFs, it could be a material amount.”
That’s a structural condition, not a number, and it’s pointed in an interesting direction. The 2024-25 ETF cycle was the dominant institutional crypto wrapper because it solved one specific problem: regulated brokerage access. The vault thesis is the bet that composable, programmable, on-chain-native DeFi vault structures eventually express the same dollar of risk exposure more efficiently than a fund wrapper that has to settle through transfer agents, NSCC, and a creation-redemption cycle on T+1 at best.
The bet’s tension worth naming: T. Rowe’s flagship digital-asset product is itself an ETF wrapper. TKNZ holds 5 to 15 of 15 eligible tokens (BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA, AVAX, LTC, DOT, DOGE, HBAR, BCH, LINK, XLM, SHIB, SUI), custodied at Anchorage Digital Bank. It is, by Kroger’s own 2031 framing, the wrapper that vaults might displace. That doesn’t make TKNZ wrong — the access trade is real, and the ETF wrapper is what gets a multi-asset spot crypto product into a 401(k) menu today — but it does mean the firm shipping it has an internal view on which wrapper class lasts and which doesn’t. Kroger’s hedge: “It really is dependent on the structure, not only operationally, but legally as well, of course.”
That hedge is the part of the answer with the most uncertainty in it. If U.S. tax and legal treatment of on-chain fund structures stays where it is, the ETF wrapper keeps its monopoly on tax-deferred and brokerage-channel distribution. If it doesn’t, the migration is large. There is no scenario in between.
The Consensus Answers
The rest of the interview produced answers that lined up with the institutional crypto consensus. Worth recording, not worth stretching.
Custody first. “Custody is one of, if not the most critical thing operationally, because you want to be confident in the security of your funds.” TKNZ’s choice is Anchorage Digital Bank, the only OCC-chartered federal trust bank with a crypto custody mandate; its OCC consent order was lifted in August 2025 after what Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley described as “tens of millions” in remediation spend. Kroger also flagged insider and supply-chain risk inside protocol teams as an underweighted threat alongside smart-contract risk. The diligence question has expanded: auditing the contract is no longer enough on its own when the people who can push to the contract are part of the threat surface.
On privacy, Kroger expects institutional demand for on-chain confidentiality to look like the TradFi analogue, dark pools and black-box algorithms, rather than consumer-grade anonymity. ZK proving is mature enough that the engineering side of “private but compliant” looks tractable. Whether Zcash specifically is the long-term answer is unsettled; Ethereum’s institutional-private chain work and parallel efforts on other L1s are the ones to watch. This sits adjacent to the distributed-versus-represented RWA framework: if positions can be proven without being revealed, more institutional flow stops needing a custodian-fronted wrapper around it.
He declined to call a winner between the public-chain bet (BlackRock, Franklin, Apollo on Securitize) and the private-chain bet (Provenance, Canton). “It is unclear if there is a right or wrong.” The same split shows up in new L1 launches between permissioned validator sets and Ethereum-style open validation. The honest read is that the two camps are not converging on a 2026 horizon. Both have institutional underwriters and both have real revenue.
Counterparty diligence at T. Rowe sounded like the standard TradFi cadence. Relationships on the front end, technical verification on the back end, small test trials before larger amounts, SOC compliance reviews. “In crypto, it’s trust, but verify.” Nothing crypto-specific in the approach, which is itself the point — the firms underwriting tokenization platforms are running them through the same operational gauntlet as any other new vendor.
The Regulatory Backdrop
The interview took place while the Senate Banking Committee was approaching its markup of the CLARITY Act. Polymarket’s odds on 2026 passage had jumped into the high-40s percent range over the prior week. Kroger’s read tracked the optimism.
“My discussions at Consensus this week seem to be trending in a favorable light that we get something passed by July. Once that is passed, the ability for companies to innovate opens up widely, rather than fear of being sought after by the government.”
He went further on political durability. The bet, in his framing, is that the capital at risk by the end of 2026 will be too large for any future administration to walk back. “There will have been too much innovation that has happened, and too much real financial capital at risk, for anyone to walk back what’s being done over the next few months. Assuming it goes through.”
The “assuming it goes through” is the live variable, and it’s the same one Anchorage’s Kevin Wysocki was tracking the week before.
The Useful Read
Strip the consensus answers out and Kroger left us with two takes that go against the prevailing pitch deck.
The first is that the tokenization win in 2026 is access, not cost savings. The basis-points story is overhyped on a near-term horizon. What’s onboarding capital is that compliance teams finally have something they can approve.
The second is that the institutional wrapper class for the back half of the decade is genuinely open. If vaults eat the ETF wrapper, the on-chain share of a multi-trillion-dollar fund complex is material. If they don’t, it stays a satellite allocation. The legal and tax treatment of on-chain fund structures is the deciding variable, and U.S. policy hasn’t moved on that question in either direction yet.
The TKNZ approval decision is what the market is watching this month. The more durable signal is that the firm shipping it has an internal view on both of those questions and is willing to talk about it, including the parts where the answer doesn’t flatter the product.
