I've been covering crypto long enough to remember when "Wall Street on the blockchain" was dismissed as fantasy. It doesn't feel like fantasy anymore.
Edwin Mata, CEO and founder of tokenization platform Brickken, projects that Wall Street will run entirely on blockchain technology by 2030. Mata told CoinDesk that tech industry buzzwords like "Web3" are fading as major banks adopt the technology for standard financial plumbing such as settlements and payments.
"The merge between Wall Street and technology is going to dissipate," Mata said. "We're not going to talk anymore about blockchain. It's merging into fintech."
That framing resonates with me. The infrastructure conversation is shifting from "why blockchain?" to "which blockchain?" and that's a significant maturation.
AI Takes Over the Financial Dashboard
The part of this conversation I found most thought‑provoking wasn't about blockchain at all. It was about what replaces the human decision‑maker inside these systems.
Brickken, a Barcelona‑based tokenization platform that has brought $500 million of real‑world assets onchain, is currently integrating AI agents to automate the onboarding of assets and the sourcing of liquidity for its 200 clients. Mata predicts that traditional software dashboards will soon be replaced by simple chat prompts, where AI agents handle the backend work of finding the best financial yields.
"The decision‑maker is not going to be us anymore. It's going to be AI," Mata said.
That's a striking statement from someone actively building the infrastructure. He's not predicting AI will assist financial professionals, he's predicting it will replace the judgment layer entirely.
Europe Is Losing the Race
Mata didn't hold back when the conversation turned to regulation, and his criticism of Europe was pointed.
Mata criticised the European Union's MiCA regulatory framework, which he said protects legacy banks by imposing expensive, slow‑moving compliance rules on small startups. "Smaller players cannot access the market, which creates a moat for the bigger players," Mata said. "It can take you nine months to get a license, and if you're a startup, nine months without monetizing, you're dead."
Startups may choose to move to the UAE and Southeast Asia rather than tackle these steep barriers.
He's not alone in thinking this. Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet made similar criticisms recently, arguing that the EU's framework has unintentionally benefited legacy financial institutions at the expense of crypto‑native innovation.
America Holds the Real Power
Despite the regulatory noise in Washington, Mata is clear about where he thinks the future gets built.
Mata believes the U.S. will remain the main powerhouse for crypto innovation simply because it controls the world's largest capital market, rendering current regulatory disputes in Washington temporary noise.
That view is backed by real evidence on the ground. The push toward blockchain‑native infrastructure was highlighted by Bullish's $4.2 billion acquisition of transfer agent Equiniti, targeting corporate shareholder recordkeeping to ensure shares are issued and recorded directly onchain from the start rather than using synthetic digital wrappers.
When billion‑dollar acquisitions are being made specifically to put share issuance directly onchain, Mata's 2030 prediction starts to feel less bold and more inevitable. The institutions have already decided. The only question left is timeline.
