The tokenisation of financial and real-world assets is emerging as the next frontier for India’s digital ecosystem, with the potential to make asset ownership and transactions more accessible, financial market and political leaders said on Tuesday.Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis proposed the Maharashtra Digitisation and Exchange of Land Token Asset (DELTA) Act — a first-of-its-kind blockchain-based framework to tokenise land and other immovable assets.The government is bringing in expertise from different sections of the financial markets for the project, including the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the National Stock Exchange (NSE), BSE, and the academia to unlock dormant capital, improve liquidity, and bring transparency while also protecting consumer interests, Fadnavis said at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai on Wednesday.While the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has successfully digitised transactions, the next generation of financial technology (fintech) should aim to democratise credit, ownership, and opportunity, he noted.On a similar note, Vasudevan Parameswaran, Executive Director at the RBI, said, ”tokenisation can change the entire way we look at our digital financial ecosystem.” Rohit Jain, Deputy Governor at the RBI, said “tokenisation is creating new possibilities for how financial assets are represented and settled. Distributed technologies are reshaping elements of market infrastructure.”Also Read | SEBI to launch pilot for bond tokenisation; eases FPI onboarding processTokenising financial assets refers to breaking down an asset into smaller pieces, making it more accessible, especially for the retail audience, by reducing the ownership cost. For example, a bond worth Rs 10 lakh apiece can be broken down into smaller units so that investors can buy a part with just Rs 100. It also means digitising assets, leading to stronger ownership records and shorter settlement times.“There were some discussions yesterday. Gold tokenisation is one more avatar being explored. There are challenges in the existing modes, but that can be fulfilled by tokenisation,” said Vasudevan at the same event. While Fadnavis focused more on the tokenisation of real-world assets such as land, RBI members approached the issue from the perspective of tokenising financial assets.Story continues below this ad“Small initiatives can sometimes lead to bigger things. Like we started with pilots on CBDC (central bank digital currency) for retail and wholesale. Then, going forward, we brought in blockchain in a different way to reach out to the ecosystem. Then we realised that assets could also be tokenised, so the unified markets interface (UMI) came in,” he added.Also Read | Explained: What is tokenisation and why has RBI issued new guidelines?The RBI had introduced the UMI in October last year to digitise and tokenise the country’s financial asset ecosystem. The goal was to make owning financial assets as easy as UPI made payments for the retail audience.The central bank has already tokenised financial instruments such as government bonds, commercial papers, and certificates of deposits. “Unified Markets Interface has been a good launch pad, but we are hopeful to add more asset classes to it, and that will actually make the ecosystem much bigger,” said Vasudevan.However, he also pointed to potential risks posed by tokenising financial assets. “There are issues of legal clarity, legal certainty, data privacy, data movement, consent management, those are some challenges. So, we need to be mindful,” he noted.Story continues below this adOther sections of the financial ecosystem have also been pushing for tokenisation, with the SEBI set to come up with a pilot for corporate bond tokenisation.