Deutsche Bank's FX strategy team has published a special report linking three themes that most observers still treat separately: the AI capital boom, asset tokenization, and the future of the dollar. The thesis, from strategist Mallika Sachdeva, is straightforward and uncomfortable: the United States is going all-in on private foreign capital to fund both its AI buildout and its deficits, and blockchain rails are the tool being used to widen the funnel.

An unprecedented reach for capital

The scale of the US capital-raising effort this year has no precedent:

• AI venture funding has topped $400bn in 2026, running at three times last year's pace, with over 90% of the largest deals in the US.
• The two largest US AI labs have raised a combined $217bn this year, with each valued near $1 trillion.
• Hyperscalers (Google, Meta, Oracle, Amazon) averaged about $25bn a year in investment-grade debt issuance over 2020-24. In 2026 year-to-date, they have done roughly ten times that. Microsoft has still not tapped debt markets.
• Google completed its first primary equity raise since its 2004 IPO in June, pulling in $85bn.
• SpaceX listed near a $2tn valuation in June — the largest debut valuation on record — and reportedly earmarked 30% of the deal for retail investors.
• US AI capex is expected around $800bn this year; China's is closer to $100bn.

The report's most important chart covers foreign equity inflows. Q2 2026 alone saw more than $400bn of foreign equity capital flow into the US, well above any prior quarter and well beyond what index performance alone would explain. Equity flows have now overtaken long-term debt flows as the primary source of US capital account financing. Deutsche Bank describes this as a critical change in the FX world, one that argues for greater volatility as capital moves through global equity markets.

The bank calls it a "geopolitics-to-technology funding swap": official, long-term, geopolitically motivated buyers of Treasuries are fading, while private, shorter-term, tech-motivated equity buyers take their place. The backdrop is well documented: after Russia's reserves were frozen in 2022, a number of surplus countries diversified reserves away from dollars and Treasuries, and US deficits have kept widening, so the shift in who funds America is a live question for Treasury market liquidity as well as for FX.

Tokenization moves to the core

Deutsche Bank also argues that the tokenization of US securities has moved from the fringe to the core of market infrastructure. The timeline:

• The SEC's Project Crypto launched in July 2025 and was folded into a joint SEC-CFTC framework in January 2026.
• In December 2025, the SEC gave DTC a no-action letter, effectively blessing the idea that the same security can trade on traditional and on-chain rails with identical rights.
• In July 2026, DTC ran its first live tokenization tests with 40 firms. SPY was tokenized, and JPMorgan posted tokenized collateral to meet a CME margin call.
• DTC plans to launch its tokenization service by October, starting with the Russell 1000, ETFs, and Treasuries.
• NYSE is building a 24/7 platform with Securitize, and Nasdaq is targeting full tokenization capability by 2027.

The significance of the DTC no-action letter is that DTCC's subsidiaries clear and settle the bulk of US equities, so its participation moves tokenization from startup pilots into the plumbing of the mainstream market. This also builds on groundwork already in place: JPMorgan's Onyx has run blockchain-based intraday repo since 2020, and BlackRock launched its tokenized BUIDL money-market fund in 2024.

Only about $40bn of real-world assets are tokenized today, against a US asset universe north of $100tn. Estimates for the 2030s range from $2tn to $30tn — and Deutsche Bank considers those figures low.

The Korea example is the one to file away. Korea accounts for 2% of global GDP but represented 10% of the $740bn in foreign equity inflows to the US last year, largely from retail investors and largely because Korean brokerages lowered access hurdles early with fractional trading and daytime access to US stocks. The bank's point: if 24/7, instant-settlement, $1-minimum access to US assets goes global, that becomes a powerful force. Current US market convention — two business days to settle, market hours only — dates from an era of paper certificates, and every shortening of that cycle has historically expanded who can participate.

What it means for the dollar

Tokenization makes US assets more attractive — through collateral velocity, instant repo, and a cheaper cost of capital — and more accessible. Both pull capital in. The problem is that the same rails that lower the hurdle for inbound capital also lower it for outbound capital. Deutsche Bank's conclusion is that the dollar is becoming riskier, more equity-sensitive, and directly leveraged to the AI race.

The report includes a scatter of currency-equity correlations against net international investment positions and notes that the safe-haven properties of the US dollar are eroding. That marks a break with the pattern of past decades, in which the dollar tended to strengthen during global risk-off episodes, and it carries implications for reserve managers and for investors who hold dollars as a hedge against equity drawdowns.

The tail risk is stated plainly: if AI proves uneconomical, or if the US starts to fall behind, the dollar is very exposed. Put differently, the dollar is increasingly a bet on US tech companies winning in AI.

China is playing a different game

The final section reframes the story as a contest between economic models rather than AI models.

The US is running what Deutsche Bank calls "open markets, closed tech": open the doors to foreign capital, keep model weights proprietary, protect pricing power, and reward shareholders. China is running "open tech, closed markets": push out low-cost open-weight models, keep the capital account managed, and fund capex from a trade surplus that is actually growing on AI-related exports.

China doesn't need foreign capital, so it doesn't need tokenization. In February, the PBOC and CSRC tightened rules on RWA tokenization and offshore RMB stablecoins while steering toward a controlled e-CNY. Chinese labs have raised a fraction of what US labs have; DeepSeek's $7.4bn round was the largest. Chinese models already account for more than half of US company token usage on OpenRouter. If the open-weight approach commoditizes AI and caps the excess profits of US labs, Deutsche Bank argues, it threatens more than valuations: it threatens the funding model that now underpins both the AI buildout and the US deficit, and the premise that open capital markets always deliver the winning innovation.

A report about financing

Strip out the blockchain language and this is a report about financing. The US has swapped official Treasury demand for private equity demand, is building infrastructure to make that swap bigger and faster, and has tied the dollar's fortunes to whether AI earns a return. Europe is on board with tokenization but lacks the AI footprint. China has opted out because it doesn't need the money.

For FX markets, the practical takeaway is that USD is increasingly a bet on the Nasdaq, and the old assumption that the dollar rallies when equities fall deserves a hard second look.

Source: ForexLive