Revolutionary technology can sometimes take over a decade to materialize and blockchain is no exception. In a recent opinion piece in MarketWatch, Brooke Navarro of tZERO gives her thoughts on what we can expect in the future.

Blockchain entered the public discourse around 2017 but since then the industry has been quickly building despite the media being much quieter on its promise nowadays. However, anyone who has any experience in the financial world will know—it’s woefully inefficient still. Money still does not move like information. Blockchain partly holds the key to making this possible.

As Brooke Navarro of tZERO writes in her recent op-ed in MarketWatch, a human error can sometimes leave a team “scrambling to execute a transaction” and she has seen it countless time.

“There are dozens more examples of frictions, inefficiencies, costs and opportunities for human error and mischief in the business of trading securities, but one of the most significant is that equity trades still take three days to settle (T+2),” she writes. Fortunately, though, we are on the cusp of a major shift in how we conceive of capital markets. And the push will mainly from the nascent security token industry.

Navarro predicts that “within five years” we can expect retail investors to floor markets which are currently limited to the uber-wealthy and well-connected. Blockchain technology effectively allows for the ‘opening up’ of financial markets like never before. This is because “settlement of digital trades can happen within seconds without human intervention.”

We are still, however, in the early days of this technological transformation. However, blockchain is clearly on the map whether the public is aware now or not. Eventually, this technology will cover our entire globe as tokenization allows for real-time processing of all trading. It will, in effect, be a major step in creating a universal, global market which does not lag or stutter. In other words, financial assets will move through the world like information does today: in the blink of an eye.

A major step towards this future will rest with security tokens which, as Navarro writes, “will represent the next generation of how the world will trade and determine value.” The technology is there—now all that’s needed is for the world to ‘trust’ blockchain. Luckily, with a blockchain system, there’s no need to trust; one can just verify.

Do you believe will begin to see wide scale real-world impact on markets by blockchain during the 2020s? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.