Columbia professor calls New York Stock Exchange tokenization plan vaporware

Omid Malekan, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, questioned the announcement in a post on X on 20 January 2026, writing that it read like “vaporware” and left key details unclear. Malekan listed open questions including which blockchain the system would use, whether tokenized assets would be permissioned or permissionless, and how fees and token-related mechanics would work. Vaporware is commonly used to describe a product that is publicly promoted before it exists in a functional form.

In an opinion article published by Fortune, Malekan argued that the NYSE’s existing business model is built on a centralized market structure and long-standing relationships with intermediaries, and that tokenization implies a different architecture that may not map cleanly onto that setup. He wrote that moving to an onchain model would require new operational capabilities and incentives, and compared the initiative to AT&T’s late-1990s efforts to dominate the early internet, arguing that leadership in one technology era does not guarantee leadership in the next.

Other industry figures described the NYSE initiative as constructive for tokenization. Carlos Domingo, founder and chief executive of tokenization firm Securitize, wrote on X that onchain trading of “native tokenized equities” would be positive if implemented without wrappers or derivative structures. Alexander Spiegelman, head of research at Aptos Labs, also wrote that it was time to apply blockchain technology to market infrastructure. Cointelegraph reported it contacted the NYSE for additional information on the project.

ARK Invest published separate research on 21 January 2026 estimating that the market for tokenized real-world assets could expand from $22.2 billion to $11 trillion by 2030, citing regulatory clarity and institutional infrastructure as factors that could support growth.

As GNcrypto wrote on 16 January 2026, ARK Invest founder and chief executive Cathie Wood argued in the firm’s 2026 Outlook that Bitcoin’s fixed issuance schedule makes it a more inelastic scarce asset than gold because supply cannot rise in response to higher prices; the report noted gold rose about 65% in 2025 while Bitcoin fell about 6%, and estimated gold’s annual supply growth at about 1.8% versus Bitcoin issuance of about 0.82% per year for the next two years, decelerating to about 0.41% thereafter.