Across financial institutions, tokenized assets are already being issued, managed, and settled in production environments.
But as adoption accelerates, one gap becomes clear: there is still no common language between systems.
That was the central theme of a Meetup hosted by Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LFDT), where Surendra Kalidindi, CTO of OpenAssets, an LFDT Premier member, joined leaders from across the ecosystem to discuss the role of open standards in scaling tokenized markets.
Over the past few years, institutions have made significant progress in bringing assets onchain.
Different platforms now support tokenized bonds, funds, payments, and digital assets across multiple blockchain environments.
Yet in practice, these systems remain fragmented.
Assets are often:
Even when institutions operate in the same market, their systems don’t naturally interoperate.
As a result, liquidity is constrained, processes are duplicated, and settlement still relies on legacy coordination layers.
With blockchain moving beyond pilots and now part of production environments across institutions, the focus is turning toward how these systems interact.
The Open Tokenized Asset Standard (OTAS) was introduced to address this gap.
OTAS is designed as an open, chain-agnostic framework that defines how tokenized asset systems can connect, without requiring institutions to change their underlying infrastructure.
Rather than prescribing a single model, OTAS focuses on shared alignment across four key areas:
In practice, this means creating a common layer at the language level where institutions can:
The goal is not to standardize how institutions build internally, but to standardize how they interact.
OTAS is being developed as an open, community-driven effort under LFDT, focused on creating protocol-agnostic smart contract reference implementations for tokenized assets.
The standard is live on GitHub as an LFDT lab, with ongoing work across research, specifications, and reference implementations: https://github.com/OpenTokenizedAssetStandard
Its evolution depends on participation across the ecosystem.
At OpenAssets, we have seen firsthand how fragmentation impacts real-world deployments.
Working across multiple chains, regulatory environments, and asset classes has made one thing clear: tokenization alone has not been enough to unlock scale in practice.
That’s why OpenAssets is a founding member of OTAS and the driving force in establishing it under LFDT.
Our contribution focuses on helping define a neutral, protocol-agnostic foundation for tokenized assets through open smart contract reference implementations, establishing a common baseline that institutions can build on or integrate with their existing platforms.
This approach supports interoperability without requiring institutions to change how they operate internally.
We believe systems designed to work together are the ones that scale.
One of the strongest signals from the webinar was alignment across participants.
Speakers from organizations such as Chainlink Labs, JP Morgan, and Mysten Labs reinforced a shared perspective:
The discussion highlighted the need for industry-wide coordination, with institutions working together to enable interoperability at scale. Watch the full conversation here:
The future of tokenization will be shaped by how systems connect across platforms and protocols, enabling institutions to operate across environments more effectively.
As more institutions move into production, scaling these systems will increasingly depend on shared standards.
OTAS represents a defining step in that direction.
And like all meaningful standards, its success will depend on participation, iteration, and alignment across the ecosystem. We invite you to join the OTAS community and help advance this important standard. Find us on Discord or, starting June 2, join our biweekly community calls.
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The conversation continues on June 10, when Bryan Bodner, Head of Business and Corporate Development at OpenAssets, joins an upcoming LF Decentralized Trust Member Webinar.
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