Nandan Nilekani declared "the time for tokenisation has arrived" at Global Fintech Fest 2026. India's regulators, RBI and SEBI, are actively enabling this vision, with Maharashtra already pushing a law for land tokenisation. The potential scales to a $19 trillion market in seven years, moving illiquid assets onto verifiable ledgers.
How We Got Here
Nilekani, the architect behind Aadhaar, highlighted tokenisation as the next critical digital public infrastructure play at GFF 2026. His vision follows years of foundational work on digital identity and payments, positioning India to unlock value from currently illiquid assets.
The Numbers
- RBI is actively considering gold tokenisation, alongside SEBI's Demat 2.0 initiative.
- Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis announced a new law to tokenise land assets.
- SEBI and RBI plan "India’s First Tokenized Corporate Bond," with companies already launching them.
- Nilekani cited a Tamil Nadu village, Udhangarai, where cattle can be tokenised using biometric muzzle patterns for loan collateral.
- Global estimates suggest the tokenised asset market will grow from $600 billion today to $19 trillion within 7-8 years.
What Happens Next
🇮🇳 Why This Matters for India
For unorganised small farmers in districts like Udhangarai or small and medium enterprises in Tier-2 cities, tokenisation could unlock collateral value and access to credit that traditional finance ignores.
The Take
The real bottleneck here won't be regulatory will, which is clearly present; it will be building the robust physical-to-digital bridges for diverse assets, especially in India’s unorganised sectors. Expect this to create a massive wave of infra and verification startups over the next 36 months.
Source:
MediaNama ↗