Tom Zschach: Trillions Are Coming Onchain And Institutions Are Ready (Acceptance Layer)

Swift’s ledger is live, which Tom Zschach described as an institutional tokenization milestone that few would have expected three years ago. He also pointed to a DTCC announcement involving more than $30 trillion in tokenized Treasuries. DTCC’s work under an SEC no-action letter is an important first step, he said, but the initial service has constraints and does not let tokenized assets move freely. The announcements signal institutional progress, not that tokenized assets are already universally transferable or accepted.

Zschach’s central distinction is between tokenization and acceptance. Creating a token does not establish what it represents, what rights come with it, or how it can be redeemed. Each receiving institution decides whether to accept an asset, based on its own policies, risk appetite, and rules. An issuer’s claims—or a token’s appearance—are not proof that the underlying asset exists. A holder of tokenized gold, for example, still needs to know where the gold is.

Logos is building an evidence layer intended to make those questions easier to answer. Zschach said evidence about an asset’s location and the parties able to attest to it should be discoverable, retrievable, and verifiable. Publishing evidence once and making it assessable across venues could help recipients evaluate an asset without relying solely on an issuer’s assurances. It could also help identify the intended token during settlement, when a recipient needs confidence that the asset being handled is the one it agreed to accept.

Issuer-level eligibility checks do not, by themselves, establish that an asset will be accepted elsewhere. For a token to work as collateral beyond the issuer’s network or custodian, a recipient needs trusted, verifiable evidence of its properties. If those properties cannot be fully established, the asset may trade at a discount or receive a collateral haircut. The evidence layer is therefore aimed at a practical obstacle to broader use: recipients need enough information to make their own decisions before they act on a token.

Zschach expects tokenization to encompass tens or hundreds of thousands of asset types, with a similarly large number of destinations. Reviewing documents manually, issuer by issuer, would not scale to that range. Tokenized assets will need distribution to marketplaces worldwide, while custodians will need to onboard them faster, at lower cost, and with less risk. Logos is focused on helping verify what a token represents before a recipient acts on it, rather than building issuance or settlement systems.

The company’s initial design partners are PaySend and Securitize, spanning stablecoin payments and securities or mutual funds. Logos is also seeking input from digital custodians, prime brokers, marketplaces, and clearing utilities, whose decisions determine whether assets can be received and used. PaySend was expected to provide more details about XDR, a stablecoin intended for use outside the U.S. Zschach also expects institutions to build new onchain products, including bank deposit tokens for customer payments around the clock; broader collateral acceptance could raise loan-to-value ratios.

Zschach described roughly five years of infrastructure building ahead and favored investment in infrastructure, cybersecurity, scalability, and teams developing products on top. Logos has no chain or token, which he said allows it to work with other projects without competing over tokenomics. Its stated aim is to support compliant, safe adoption at scale, and to help tokenization create new value and shift allocation—not merely refresh the existing system.