The Coming Tokenization of Everything and What it Means for Life Insurance: Part 1

Our industry is famously slow to adopt new technologies. The pace is driven by both compliance and regulatory hurdles, which makes innovation dangerous. Apis Productions is positioned in a unique seat in the theater of our industry. As consultants, technologists, and marketers, our team has both built and witnessed the evolution of technology in the industry over the last 20 years. Recently, the entire industry has been abuzz with talk of AI. We know. We promote it, consult on it, build solutions with it, and love it. The age of AI is already here and has been chugging through our industry (and every other industry) like a locomotive. But there is another train coming down the track that nobody is thinking about. At the moment, its headlight glows faintly in the distance. Perhaps that is why nobody is paying attention to the vibrating rails beneath our feet. But make no mistake. It is coming, and when it arrives…it will change everything. 

Welcome to Part 1.  Welcome to Tokenization.

As part of our endeavor to keep our BGA, IMO, Wealth Management, and Carrier clients up to speed with the noteworthy trends and solutions, I wanted to write about a topic that I have heard virtually no one in our industry talking about yet. Tokenization. This topic is still gaining momentum after years of suffering its own regulatory hurdles. But its time, I believe, is approaching swiftly. For this article, which is part 1 in a series, my goal is to help explain tokenization, summarize its history, explain its breakthrough in financial institutions, and whet your appetite for how it will eventually shape the products and services we all rely upon.  

Ignorance is Simply the Moment Before Understanding

If you are reading this and your entire knowledge of “crypto” is limited to Bitcoin, stories of people getting rich (or wrecked) in 2017 and 2021, and maybe a vague sense that it’s all speculative gambling—you are actually like 95% of the life insurance professionals we talk to every day.

That’s perfectly fine.

That’s exactly where almost every banker, fund manager, and regulator was five years ago.

But something has changed in the last 18–24 months that almost no one in traditional insurance has noticed yet:

The biggest, most conservative financial institutions on earth—BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, UBS, Siemens, Goldman Sachs—have quietly begun moving real money, real bonds, real fund shares, and real treasury bills onto blockchains.

They are not doing it for speculation. They are doing it because the technology finally works better than the old system and, most importantly, the regulators are now allowing it.

Blockchain allows for faster, safer, more transparent, and reliable movement of currency between parties.  The utility of tokens such as Etherium, Solana, and XRP are based on underlying technologies that allow for this movement of value.  

The original token, Bitcoin, is seen more as a store of value the same way physical gold is also a store of value.  Moving money (USD) costs money.  Banks regularly transfer money all around the world and the process is slow and expensive.  Blockchain and tokens allow for faster transfer, very low fees, and transparent processing. 

This is the story of how we got here.

2009–2013: Bitcoin – The Experiment Nobody Took Seriously

Bitcoin appeared in 2009. Most people who heard about it thought it was either a scam or nerd money. It was slow, expensive to use, and the only thing you could really do with it was buy pizza (one guy famously spent 10,000 BTC on two Papa John’s pizzas in 2010…that pizza today would be worth $900 million dollars!).

But Bitcoin proved one thing that changed everything: a database (the blockchain) could be shared by thousands of computers around the world, with no single company in charge, and everyone could agree on who owns what, without trusting each other. That sounds boring, I know, but it is actually one of the most important inventions in the history of money.

2015: Ethereum – The Programmable Blockchain

In 2015, a 19-year-old named Vitalik Buterin launched Ethereum.

The big idea: what if the blockchain wasn’t just a ledger of “who sent how much bitcoin to whom,” but a global computer that could run code automatically?

That code is called a “smart contract.” A smart contract is just a set of rules written in computer code: “If this happens, then do that.” And once it’s on the blockchain, no one can change it or stop it.

Suddenly, you could create your own digital tokens on top of Ethereum—tokens that represent anything you want: a share in a fund, a dollar, a piece of real estate, a vote, an insurance policy, whatever.

2017–2021: The Wild Years (That Made Everyone Think Crypto Was Just Gambling)

2017 was the ICO mania. Thousands of projects raised billions by selling tokens with whitepapers about technology that were mostly dreams. Most of them went to zero.

2021 was the NFT and meme-coin mania. People paid millions for digital pictures of monkeys (I still don’t, and will never understand how or why this happened.)

Regulators freaked out. The SEC sued companies. Many retail investors lost everything.

The mainstream financial world wrote crypto off as a casino. But behind the noise, something quieter and much more important was happening.

2018–2023: Stablecoins Quietly Took Over Cross-Border Payments

Companies like Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) issued digital dollars—tokens that are always worth exactly $1 because they are backed 1-to-1 by real cash and bonds in bank accounts.

Today, more than $200 billion of these stablecoins exist.

They settle instantly, 24/7, for fractions of a penny.

Banks and payment companies in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia started using them because Western Union and SWIFT (SWIFT is the system that moves money around the world.  Annually, they move $150 TRILLION dollars) are more expensive and significantly slower. 

Ripple (the company behind the XRP token) has been doing this for banks since 2014, albeit at a much smaller scale and mostly in pilot programs. Hundreds of financial institutions now use Ripple’s software, and some use the XRP ledger and its token to move money across borders in seconds instead of days. The momentum for ledger transfers on the blockchain for tokens like Etherium, Solana, XRP, and others is growing.  

This was the first proof that the technology could be adopted by serious institutions.

2024–2025: The Regulatory Dam Breaks and Wall Street Arrives

Everything changed when BlackRock—the largest asset manager in the world, with $11 trillion under management—decided blockchain was ready.

In March 2024, BlackRock launched BUIDL, a tokenized money-market fund on Ethereum.

You buy shares with USDC; the fund earns yield on Treasury bills; dividends are paid instantly to your wallet every day.

Within 18 months, it grew to over $2.5 billion.

Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Apollo, and others launched their own versions. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries alone now exceed $8 billion. The entire real-world asset (RWA) tokenization market is approaching $25 billion and growing exponentially.

The SEC, which had been hostile for years, began approving things:

• Bitcoin spot ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) in 2024
• Ethereum spot ETFs in 2024
• Multiple tokenized fund registrations in 2025

Regulators in Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the EU, and the UK all created clear “tokenization sandboxes” and guidelines. Today, in the United States, the ‘Clarity Act’, which helps define rules for digital assets that will allow tokens to pass regulatory muster, has passed in Congress and is being worked on in the Senate with broad bipartisan support. (Finally, something they all agree on!) 

JPMorgan now moves hundreds of millions per day on its own blockchain (Onyx). Siemens issued a €100 million digital bond on a public blockchain. The European Investment Bank, the World Bank—everyone is testing or live.

The technology has won.

What Tokenization Actually Means (in Plain English)

Tokenization = taking something valuable (a share, a bond, a dollar, a piece of real estate, an insurance policy) and turning its ownership rights into a digital token on a blockchain.

That token can:

• Be sent to anyone in the world in seconds
• Be split into tiny pieces (fractional ownership)
• Pay income automatically (smart contracts)
• Be used as collateral instantly
• Trade 24/7
• Never get lost in the mail or delayed by a custodian

All while being visible and auditable by regulators in real time.

Why This Is Coming for Life Insurance and Annuities

We are not there yet—but the path is now clear.  Tokenization is likely to hit products that have cash growth capabilities such as permanent and whole life insurance products and annuities. Term products, will likely not be as easily integrated, at least at first.  

Imagine:

• Cash value in a permanent policy that can be used as collateral anywhere, instantly
• Policies that can be fractionally owned or sold in pieces
• Death benefits paid in minutes instead of months
• Annuity income streams that can be sold or borrowed against seamlessly
• Premium finance loans that are liquid and tradable

This is not merely speculative. These are already being built in private pilots by forward-thinking carriers and fintechs.

In our next article (Part 2), we will walk through exactly what tokenized life insurance and annuities could look like in practice—and which carriers and platforms are already moving.

In short:

The institutions have arrived.

The regulators have opened the door.

The technology works.

The only remaining question is which parts of our industry will be ready when the train rolls through our station? And how will it ultimately shape the landscape of protecting families and assets moving forward?

The future is being written on-chain, one block at a time.