Brickken co-founder and chief revenue officer Ludovico Rossi believes that, despite the attention given to agentic commerce, it won’t reach its potential until stakeholders are convinced there are enforceable controls over agents. They must also be assured that data can be reliably available on-chain and across systems.
Founded in 2020, Brickken predates real-world assets (RWAs). Rossi said the initial focus was on asset fractionalization, but the approach evolved into a more asset-agnostic model of issuing financial instruments, and now into agentic capital markets. Brickken has created and contributed to Ethereum standards, including ERC-7943 for compliant tokenized assets and ERC-8226 (RAMS), which enables institutions to delegate transaction authority to AI agents within predefined limits and verify their actions on-chain. OpenZeppelin recently cited ERC-8226 as an early effort to work with agent authority in regulated finance.
OpenZeppelin recently highlighted ERC-8226 as one of the first industry efforts addressing agent authority in regulated finance.
Brickken knew early on that this is a trillion-dollar space, but the trick would be to position the company as the source for tokenization, whatever form it takes. That means offering flexible solutions to meet the unique needs of individual companies and their markets, recognizing an issuer’s unique intellectual property and its ability to connect directly with consumers on its own website. It must accommodate differences in business lines and geographies, with APIs letting companies tailor their approaches to their brand identity and audience.
The tokenization shift
Recently, 39 U.S. state banking associations announced their backing for a nationwide blockchain network for tokenized deposits, stablecoins and automated settlement. That’s a welcome sign that tokenized assets are becoming more mainstream.
It also heralds a shift from tokenization’s early days. Rossi said many participants were retailers and new entrants seeking opportunity. Now, it’s institutions seeking to maximize this revolutionary technology as they see the liquidity potential.
“They are seeing real value for their products,” Rossi said. “It’s translated into efficiency.
“Why tokenize an asset? To make it more liquid. Liquid means you can access it really quickly by collateralizing it. And you can unlock secondary markets.”
But it takes time. Layers of regulation and legacy systems slow them down. Technology providers must ensure regulatory clarity and prove interoperability between different systems and networks.
Brickken and RedStone identify 3 forces changing capital markets
Brickken recently co-authored a report with RedStone on agentic capital markets. It describes how three distinct forces have converged and how that will impact finance. Institutions are deploying agents that do more than advise; they act. Assets are becoming machine-readable, and machines can pay each other.
That has significant regulatory implications. Autonomous systems must ensure KYC, KYB, and AML processes satisfy regulators that they honestly represent a human’s wishes. Institutions must know how to delegate and revoke permissions, and be confident they can.
Rossi believes two Brickken developments do just that. RAMS allows institutions to delegate permissions and set the limits within which an eligible agent can act autonomously. RAC 8320 is an asset registry that standardizes asset information and makes it machine-readable.
Rossi described this as a foundation for building “the Bloomberg terminal onchain.”
RAMS addresses delegation and operating limits, while RAC 8320 provides standardized asset information that agents can read and use.
“Thanks to these two things, we are building the rails for agentic capital markets,” Rossi said. “Bankers can be more secure of transacting in the regulated market more autonomously.”
So far, asset managers are dipping their toes in the agentic waters. According to the Brickken/RedStone report, only 6% described their AI use as decision-making, with 74% deeming it operational and 69% describing it as a “co-pilot”. Six possible reasons are mandated infrastructure, model reliability, liability, economics, adoption pace, and regulatory timing.
While asset managers are decidedly cautious, the numbers show they are moving forward. Distributed value nearly quadrupled from $10.15 billion last January to $38.82 billion in September 2026. Tokenized US Treasuries followed a similar pattern, morphing from $3.91 billion to $15.7 billion over the same 20 months. Tokenized equities surged nearly tenfold to hit $2.79 billion across 5,880 instruments.
Total RWA perpetuals trading was $313 billion in all of 2025. It was $524.8 billion in Q1 2026 alone.
Agentic adoption is progressing
Rossi said agentic adoption has followed distinct adoption phases, beginning with individuals using agents for themselves. They then work more closely with the agent but lessen their reviewing frequency over time.
“Everybody’s still experimenting,” he said, while adding there’s huge hype around developers building APIs for solid use cases. “Everyone’s agreeing this is the future. I guess in the next two years we’ll see a huge development around it, and by 2030, we will see a real brand coming up and getting institutions playing with it.”
Rossi said assets must be agent-readable and legally compliant, but also freely tradeable. Both halves are equally important.
The industry recognizes this, with participants like Brickken and RedStone actively solving it. The benefits are profound.
“The machines are way more efficient than humans, and we will see this exponential growth in transaction and trading value,” Rossi asserted. “This will be huge. If we connect all those different venues and blockchains, wewill get the real answer to this.
“This won’t happen if we are not able to bring valuable data on-chain and have the data being reliable and accessible anytime… continuously. An operator can check some value a couple of times a day, but an agent can check it multiple times per second.”
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In the report, Rossi describes why proper asset configuration will free agentic transactions to be truly revolutionary:
“Most of the debate about agents starts with the agent. In regulated markets it should start with the asset. An agent can only act on an instrument whose rules it can read: who may hold it, when it can move, what the issuer must disclose. Where those rules are written into the instrument and checked at the moment of transfer, the question for an institution shifts from whether to trust the agent to whether to trust the instrument, and that is a question capital
markets already know how to answer.”