SettleMint's 10-year anniversary coincides with an inflection point in tokenization that we have been building for. We marked the occasion with a conversation with our co-founders Matthew Van Niekerk and Roderik van der Veer, hosted by Rachel Pether of FintechTV.
Ten years on, I expect the next ten to arrive exponentially quicker than the last.
Why? The underlying theme is that banks, market infrastructures and asset managers no longer deploy tokenization as a discrete use case to be justified on its own terms, but as an integral part of the future of finance.
Digital assets found their first critical use case in payments; the wider wave is in real-world assets. Almost every major financial institution has launched a tokenized fund, and on-chain value excluding stablecoins reached roughly $31bn in August 2026, more than double a year earlier, and still a fraction of the market it is moving into.
Our discussions with clients are evolving from "can you do this on-chain" to "how do we integrate this with our core banking system". That makes on-chain/off-chain interoperability the critical part.
This is where SettleMint focuses, and where we have spent a decade expanding our capabilities in managing the digital asset lifecycle.
Lifecycle is everything after the token exists: servicing, corporate actions, compliance, settlement, redemption. It is also where the regulated constraints sit. Compliance cannot be a bolt-on checked after the fact; it has to live with the asset and stay configurable as regulation changes year to year.
And these are not pilots. Our clients are specifying systems with a ten- to twenty-year operating life, which means they have to survive regulatory change, organizational change and the people who built them leaving.
Take a tokenized bond. Issuing it is the easy part. It has to connect to the core banking and asset servicing systems already in place, or the bank is running a parallel book. Compliance has to be enforced before a transfer executes rather than reconstructed afterward, because a transfer restriction checked after settlement is not a restriction. And it has to keep working for the life of the instrument (coupons, corporate actions, redemption) through whatever the regulator changes in the meantime.
If this touches something you are working on internally, our team would welcome a conversation:
Adam Popat
Chief Executive Officer, SettleMint