Tokenized RWAs Hit $26B, but Liquidity Still Lags

The value of tokenised real-world assets has surpassed $26.4 billion in on-chain value, up from around $6.6 billion this time last year, according to data from RWA.xyz, which tracks tokenised real-world assets excluding stablecoins. 

The nearly fourfold jump in twelve months is significant, but the mechanics underneath it tell a more precise story about where institutional adoption actually stands.

The move past $25 billion confirms that tokenisation is no longer a side project for a handful of innovators, but a tool that large financial players are starting to roll out at scale. 

Major asset managers, including BlackRock, Fidelity, and WisdomTree, have joined this trend with their own tokenised fund products. JPMorgan has processed tokenised transactions through its Onyx Digital Assets platform, suggesting that blockchain is increasingly being treated as a serious settlement and record-keeping layer for mainstream financial assets.

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, stated: 

“The next generation for markets, the next generation for securities, will be tokenization of securities.”

Six Categories, One Pattern

Several categories — including private credit and U.S. Treasuries — have surpassed the $1B threshold: private credit, commodities, U.S. Treasuries, corporate bonds, non-U.S. government debt, and institutional alternative funds.

Within this group, U.S. government debt stands out as the most mature and visible category. Over the past year, the number of tokenised U.S. Treasury products tracked by Nexus Data Labs has increased from 35 to more than 50 instruments. 

The appeal is relatively intuitive: Treasuries are widely used as collateral and as a core component of conservative portfolios. By tokenising short-term sovereign debt and placing it on public chains, institutions gain a way to plug a familiar asset into an infrastructure that promises faster settlement cycles and more programmable use cases.

Rob Hadick, general partner at Dragonfly, wrote: 

“Tokenization is less about creating new assets and more about building better infrastructure for the ones that already exist.”

Issuance is Driving Growth – Not Trading

Market observers note that the move past $25 billion does not simply reflect price appreciation; new issuance has been the dominant driver of growth. 

Transaction data shows that many of the largest movements of tokenised RWAs cluster around transfers of roughly $10 million each – a size profile more consistent with institutional batching and portfolio rebalancing than with a deep, two-sided secondary market. According to financial innovator, Sid Powell: 

“Tokenized real-world assets are bringing traditional credit markets on-chain, but liquidity will take time to develop.”

A February 2026 survey by tokenisation platform Brickken confirms the intent behind these flows. When asked about their main incentive to tokenise assets, 53.8% of issuers cited capital formation and fundraising efficiency as their primary goal. 

By contrast, only 15.4% pointed to liquidity as the main driver. This split suggests a market that is primarily using blockchain as an issuance and structuring tool, rather than as a vehicle for continuous on-chain price discovery.

The DeFi Integration Gap

The most structurally telling data point concerns how little of the tokenised asset base interacts with open financial protocols. 

Estimates from Nexus Data Labs suggest the supply of stablecoins backed by real-world collateral stands at roughly $8.49 billion, yet only about $1 billion of that amount, or 11.8%, is currently deployed inside DeFi protocols. Close to 88% of RWA-backed stablecoin supply remains outside permissionless DeFi environments.

The reasons are less about technical limitations and more about regulatory and compliance constraints. The underlying assets typically require issuers to implement know-your-customer checks, enforce transfer restrictions, and maintain whitelists of eligible counterparties – limiting how seamlessly those tokens can plug into the broader permissionless DeFi stack.

The contrast is stark: for on-chain dollar products operating without strict whitelisting, utilisation rates above 90% are not unusual, with some protocols cited above 96%.

Architecture, Not Just Adoption

With projections suggesting that tokenised real-world assets could surpass $400 billion in value by the end of 2026, the debate is shifting from “if” this space will grow to “how” it will be architected. 

If most RWAs remain inside permissioned silos with strict KYC gates and transfer controls, blockchains may effectively become an alternative settlement layer for traditional finance – but not a radically different one. 

Regulatory clarity is beginning to remove at least one layer of uncertainty. Federal banking regulators issued guidance stating that if a security is tokenised but confers the same legal rights as its conventional form, it should receive the same capital treatment as that traditional security. 

This clarification effectively removes a regulatory overhang that had slowed institutional experimentation with tokenised bonds and equities.

The $26 billion milestone marks the end of tokenisation’s proof-of-concept phase. The next threshold – whether these assets become composable, open-market instruments or remain a more efficient version of the closed markets that already exist – is the one that will determine the technology’s true financial footprint