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Points of Focus
- Tokenization has moved beyond experimentation, with Treasuries, private credit, commodities and equities attracting institutional capital.
- $8.4 billion in daily transfers isn’t necessarily trading. Redemptions, custodial movements and transfers can inflate activity without secondary liquidity.
- 1.8 million holders don’t equal 1.8 million active users. Wallet counts reveal little about how many independent investors actively use tokenized assets.
Onchain real-world assets (RWAs) have finally produced the numbers tokenization advocates spent years promising: $38.29 billion in distributed value, 1.8 million holding addresses, and $8.4 billion in daily transfer volume.
From US Treasuries and money market funds to private credit and tokenized equities, traditional finance isn’t just flirting with crypto. It has set up camp on the ledger.
By every headline metric, tokenization won.
But here is the plot twist: Where are the actual users?
The data tells a quieter story. An asset moving onchain isn’t proof of demand but just migration. A funded wallet doesn’t equal an active investor. Billions in total transfer volume mean very little if secondary-market liquidity remains a ghost town.
The industry successfully proved it can mint traditional assets on a blockchain. Now comes the hard part: proving anyone actually wants to trade them there.
The industry successfully proved it can mint traditional assets on a blockchain. Now comes the hard part: proving anyone actually wants to trade them there.
$38 billion proves onchain RWAs work
The $38.29 billion figure represents distributed onchain RWA value: assets that have been tokenized and can move between wallets.
Growth has been rapid but concentrated. Tokenized US Treasuries and short-duration funds account for a substantial part of the market, alongside private credit, commodities and a growing collection of equity-linked products.
This indicates an important shift.
The first era of tokenization was largely about experimentation: Could ownership claims be represented onchain? Could regulated institutions issue them? Could compliance and blockchain infrastructure coexist?
Increasingly, the answer is yes.
Asset managers can tokenize funds, investors can subscribe and redeem onchain, and custodians and financial institutions can settle transactions using blockchain infrastructure.
The harder test comes after issuance.
$8.4 billion moves every day, but why
Daily transfer volume of approximate $8.4 billion gives an impression of a highly active market.
It isn’t necessarily trading volume.
Onchain transfer data can capture secondary trades, but it can also include subscriptions and redemptions, movements between issuer-controlled wallets, custodian settlements, bridging between networks and other operational transfers.
All of them move tokens from one address to another. Only some represent an independent buyer meeting an independent seller.
Consider a tokenized Treasury fund. An investor subscription can trigger several onchain movements as cash enters, tokens are issued and assets move between custodial or operational wallets. The blockchain records activity at every stage, even though no secondary market trade has occurred.
It makes transfer volume a useful measure of blockchain usage, but a much less reliable measure of market liquidity.
Concentration makes the distinction even more important. A relatively small number of large products, institutions and operational addresses can generate substantial onchain volume without creating a deep market of competing buyers and sellers.
Tokenization can therefore have high transfer volume and thin secondary liquidity at the same time.
Sergej Kunz, 1inch co-founder, told AlphaWire, “In order to achieve greater institutional participation in tokenized equities, one of the key obstacles that needs to be addressed is liquidity. Put simply, institutions need to be able to buy, sell, and hedge their positions at scale without causing significant price movements.
“If we look to the Nasdaq, where daily trading volume typically runs between $400–470 billion, tokenized equity DEX volume reached approximately $10.6 billion in August 2026. On a monthly basis, this leaves tokenized equities roughly 40–45 times behind. To maintain the current rate of growth, the industry needs to focus not only on volume, but also on market depth,” Kunz said.
“The aggregation of liquidity across both permissioned and permissionless ecosystems will therefore become crucial. Solutions such as 1inch already demonstrate how fragmented liquidity can be aggregated to achieve more efficient execution. As this infrastructure develops, institutions could eventually trade RWAs with the same efficiency as traditional assets. If adoption continues at its current pace, that turning point could come within the next two to three years.”
1.8 million holders aren’t necessarily 1.8 million users
The holder count presents a similar problem.
Roughly 1.8 million addresses holding tokenized RWAs sounds like a substantial investor base. But an address is not the same thing as an individual user, and a holder is not necessarily an active market participant.
One institution can operate multiple wallets. A platform wallet can represent assets belonging to several customers. Other addresses may contain residual balances or tokens that have not moved since they were received.
Distribution also varies sharply by asset class.
Institutional Treasury and fund products can hold billions of dollars while remaining concentrated among comparatively few participants. Some tokenized equities and commodities may reach many more addresses, but often with much smaller average balances.
The aggregate holder number therefore says more about how far tokenized assets have spread than about how actively they are being used.
The more revealing question is not simply how many wallets hold RWAs, but how many regularly transact with independent counterparties.
Tokenization’s first killer app may be infrastructure
This does not mean the institutional activity behind those numbers is artificial.
Quite the opposite.
Financial institutions have strong reasons to tokenize assets even without open secondary markets. Blockchain rails can improve settlement, reporting and collateral mobility, while allowing assets to move between approved counterparties and controlled environments.
For institutions, those efficiencies may be valuable enough on their own.
But they create a tokenization market that looks different from the crypto-native vision of assets circulating freely across exchanges, wallets, and DeFi protocols.
Many large RWA products remain subject to permissioned transfers, investor eligibility requirements, and other restrictions. Some trade around net asset value rather than through continuous price discovery. Others have limited integration with open DeFi.
In those cases, the blockchain functions less like a public marketplace and more like shared financial infrastructure.
This may prove to be one of tokenization’s most important applications. It just should not be confused with secondary-market adoption.
What would real secondary liquidity look like
The next stage of the market will require different metrics.
Instead of focusing primarily on total value, transfers and holder counts, secondary-market maturity can be judged by how frequently tokens change hands independently of issuance and redemption.
Other signals would include more active addresses relative to total holders, deeper order books or liquidity pools, tighter bid-ask spreads, broader collateral use and a wider range of counterparties beyond issuers, custodians and their largest clients.
Most importantly, tokenized assets would need to become useful after issuance.
A Treasury token that can move between investors, serve as collateral, enter lending markets or settle other transactions has a fundamentally different economic role from one that mostly travels between an investor, issuer and custodian.
The next $38 billion will have to prove something different
Tokenization no longer needs to prove that traditional assets can exist on blockchains. At $38.29 billion, this argument is becoming increasingly difficult to dispute.
The next challenge is turning those assets into markets.
The industry’s 1.8 million holders and $8.4 billion in daily transfers demonstrate reach and operational activity. However, they cannot by themselves answer how many people are actively trading, using or building around these assets.
That is tokenization’s new success problem.
The first $38 billion proved institutions were willing to put assets onchain. The next phase will determine whether anyone beyond the institutions moving them around has a reason to use them there.
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