The tokenized real-world asset market reached $60 billion across more than 7,000 products in the first half of 2026. Of 1,289 tokenized assets worth more than $100,000 each, 910 — representing $32.9 billion in value — recorded zero on-chain transfers in a given week, according to BeInCrypto insti...
The tokenized real-world asset market reached $60 billion across more than 7,000 products in the first half of 2026. Of 1,289 tokenized assets worth more than $100,000 each, 910 — representing $32.9 billion in value — recorded zero on-chain transfers in a given week, according to BeInCrypto institutional research data published in July 2026. The figure amounts to 56% of the measured market sitting entirely still.
The finding arrives in the same week that Citi's June 2026 "Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain" report projected a $5.5 trillion tokenized securities market by 2030 (bear case: $2.7 trillion; bull case: $8.2 trillion), and one day before the International Monetary Fund published a warning that tokenization "could make finance faster but also more prone to sudden shocks." The gap between projections and present activity defines the current state of tokenized assets: the issuance infrastructure works, the secondary market largely does not.
Forbes reported on July 2, 2026 that the tokenized asset market spans $60 billion across roughly 7,000 products and 12 asset classes, with more than 950,000 on-chain holders. Beneath these headline numbers, BeInCrypto's institutional research team tested 1,289 individual tokenized assets valued above $100,000 and found that only 379 recorded any on-chain transfers during the measurement week. The remaining 910 assets — worth $32.9 billion — showed none.
This is not a niche corner of the market. The inactive assets span multiple categories: private credit, tokenized real estate, structured products, and certain treasury instruments. Total distributed on-chain RWA value (excluding stablecoins) crossed $32 billion in early May 2026, more than tripling from roughly $5.4 billion at the start of 2025, according to RWA.xyz and Chainalysis data. Growth in issuance has been steep. Growth in activity has not kept pace.
Tokenized gold is the notable exception: spot trading in tokenized gold hit $90.7 billion in Q1 2026 alone, surpassing the $84.6 billion traded for all of 2025, per Chainalysis. Tokenized equities reached $15.1 billion in spot volume in the same period, with market cap crossing $1 billion and holders exceeding 185,000 — up from $20 million in value and fewer than 1,500 holders in December 2024.
Not all tokenized assets are built to move. The data requires a critical distinction between two categories that fundamentally change how the inactivity figure should be read.
Distributed assets sit on public blockchain rails. They can be transferred between wallets, used as collateral in DeFi protocols, and traded on secondary markets. These assets are designed for on-chain utility.
Represented assets use blockchain primarily as an internal record-keeping layer — a digital ledger entry for an off-chain position. They are not designed for public transfer. Around $27 billion of the $32.9 billion in dormant value falls into this represented category, according to BeInCrypto's analysis.
This means the "real" liquidity problem — assets designed to move but failing to do so — is concentrated in roughly $5.9 billion of distributed assets showing zero weekly transfers. That is a smaller figure than the headline suggests, but it remains significant. It indicates that even assets built for secondary markets are not generating meaningful trading activity.
Tokenized U.S. Treasuries remain the most active category. The segment holds approximately $14.79 billion across 82 assets and 65,729 holders, yielding 3.35% on a 7-day APY basis, per RWA.xyz data from June 2026.
Market share among treasury tokenizers is concentrated:
| Issuer | Approximate AUM (Q2 2026) | |---|---| | Circle (USYC) | ~$2.9B | | Ondo Finance (USDY) | ~$2.8B | | Securitize/BlackRock (BUIDL) | ~$2.5B | | Franklin Templeton (Benji) | ~$2.5B |
BlackRock's BUIDL fund distributes daily yield to whitelisted holders across Ethereum, Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon. Ondo's USDY uses a Reg S wrapper for non-U.S. retail. These products have traction because they serve a clear function: on-chain dollar yield backed by U.S. government securities. They are, in effect, programmable money-market funds.
Andrew O'Neill, lead digital assets analyst at S&P Global Ratings, has described U.S. Treasuries as the only tokenized asset class at "production-grade." He frames the broader gap as a monitoring problem: tokenized funds carry familiar off-chain risks around fund management, asset quality, and redemption, but the on-chain settlement layer moves faster than traditional markets, raising the standard for real-time risk tracking.
Private credit and structured products, by contrast, show activity concentrated almost entirely in subscriptions and redemptions rather than secondary transfers. The secondary market for these assets remains structurally thin.
Citi's June 2026 GPS report, "Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain," projects a base-case market of $5.5 trillion in tokenized securities by 2030, up from approximately $17 billion today. The forecast breaks down as follows:
The report identifies three structural enablers: DTCC, NYSE, and Nasdaq embedding tokenization into core issuance, trading, and settlement workflows; the growth of regulated on-chain money (stablecoins and tokenized deposits); and clearer U.S. regulatory frameworks.
Getting from $17 billion to $5.5 trillion in four years requires a roughly 300x expansion — a trajectory that depends on retail distribution channels that do not yet exist at scale. The current $60 billion figure (which includes represented assets that may never trade) is itself a small fraction of the end-state projection.
On July 2, 2026, Tobias Adrian, the IMF's head of monetary and capital markets, published a warning about the systemic risks embedded in tokenized finance.
"Frictions disappear — but so do buffers," Adrian wrote.
The core concern: when tokenized assets change hands, smart contracts execute trades, transfer ownership, and settle payments simultaneously on shared ledgers. Processes that once required days of clearing and reconciliation happen in moments. This speed has benefits, but it also means liquidity demands materialize in real time, collateral calls can be automated, and failures can propagate faster than institutions or supervisors can respond.
The IMF identified four risk categories:
The IMF's conclusion: existing regulatory frameworks "were built for a slower world." Settlement finality, jurisdictional applicability, and the legal standing of tokenized assets all lack definitive treatment.
U.S. regulators have moved to close some of these gaps. On March 5, 2026, the OCC, Federal Reserve Board, and FDIC jointly issued Bulletin 2026-7, clarifying the capital treatment of tokenized securities. The key ruling: an eligible tokenized security should receive the same regulatory capital treatment as its non-tokenized form, regardless of whether the underlying blockchain is permissioned or permissionless.
This technology-neutral stance removes a barrier for bank adoption. Banks holding tokenized securities must still apply standard risk management practices, but the capital charge is not elevated simply because the asset sits on a distributed ledger.
Separately, the SEC approved Nasdaq and NYSE rule changes in Q1 2026 permitting tokenized securities trading, with first trades expected by Q3. DTCC began limited production trades of tokenized real-world assets in July 2026, with a full-service launch scheduled for October. More than 50 firms participate, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Circle, Ondo Finance, and Ripple.
These regulatory and infrastructure developments address the supply side — making it easier to issue and hold tokenized assets within existing financial rails. They do not, by themselves, solve the demand side: finding buyers willing to trade these assets on secondary markets.
The liquidity problem is, at its core, a distribution problem. Tokenized assets have been built primarily for institutional use, with accreditation requirements, KYC-gated access, and minimum investment thresholds that exclude the vast majority of potential participants. EtherFuse's Taylor characterized the market as one that "97% of people can't touch."
The infrastructure for retail distribution of tokenized assets is emerging but remains early. Robinhood launched its Arbitrum-based Layer 2 chain on July 1, 2026, with tokenized stock tokens available in 120+ countries (excluding the U.S.) and DeFi integrations from Uniswap, 1inch, and others. This represents one of the first large-scale attempts to connect tokenized securities to a retail brokerage with 27.7 million funded accounts.
Whether this model — a traditional brokerage building its own L2 to distribute tokenized assets into DeFi — can generate the secondary market activity that the broader RWA sector lacks remains to be seen. The pieces are being assembled: regulatory clarity from the OCC and SEC, infrastructure from DTCC and exchanges, and now distribution via consumer-facing platforms. What is missing is evidence that retail or institutional traders want to actively trade these assets on-chain rather than hold them passively for yield.
The tokenized asset market has succeeded at issuance and failed, so far, at liquidity. Sixty billion dollars in assets sit on-chain, but the majority do not move. The market is not broken — represented assets were never designed to trade, and treasury tokens generate meaningful yield-driven demand. But the gap between the $60 billion present and the $5.5 trillion projection reveals the central challenge: tokenization without distribution is record-keeping, not a market.
The regulatory scaffolding is in place. The infrastructure providers are building. The remaining question is whether demand follows supply, or whether trillions in tokenized assets simply replicate the current pattern — issued, held, and never traded.