$33B sitting dead on-chain
Our new report exposes massive on-chain stagnation
Happy Saturday one and all!
Brian McGleenon, Global Head of News at BeInCrypto here.
At every conference this year, the same gospel has been preached with zealous fervor: tokenized Real-World Assets (RWAs) are the ultimate convergence of Wall Street and public blockchains, destined to unlock trillions in stagnant capital.
But, please read on as we have what might just be a massive reality check for you!
For the past few months, BeInCrypto Intelligence has been working quietly behind the scenes with our data partner RWA.xyz to map out the actual plumbing of this market. We didn’t just look at headline numbers; we brought in our Expert Council, including S&P Global’s Andrew O’Neill, CFA, to strictly audit our compliance methodology, and strip away the hyperbole.
The result is our brand-new report, Tokenization 2026 & Beyond.
While the promise of tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs) has long been heralded as the ultimate convergence of TradFi and decentralized rails, our findings deliver an anecdote to all the hype.
While the research tracks roughly $60 billion in tokenized RWAs across more than 7,000 products and 12 asset classes (excluding stablecoins), the findings expose a deeply bifurcated market defined by extreme concentration and massive liquidity stagnation.
The Hard Data: A Market Frozen in Place
The Core is Tiny: Just 62 assets hold 88% of the entire RWA market value.
The Oligopoly of Five: Roughly half of the market’s total value is concentrated in just five products (Figure HELOC, Circle USYC, Tether Gold, BlackRock BUIDL, and Justoken JMWH).
Widespread Stagnation: Across 1,289 tokenized assets valued above $100,000, 910 assets representing $32.9 billion had zero weekly transfers.
The Retail Exclusion: 97% of the market sits outside US retail access, leaving a mere $1.7 billion accessible to the public.
Synthetic Ownership: Tokenized stocks are growing fast, but 59% provide synthetic price exposure rather than actual ownership of the underlying shares.
To find out whether tokenization is fundamentally failing or simply maturing, we got direct reactions from five prominent CEOs leading the charge.
The Executive Consensus: Is “Dormancy” by Design?
1. Tal Elyashiv (Securitize): On the Equity and Issuance Reality
Addressing the finding that $32.9 billion sits completely stagnant on-chain, Elyashiv counters that this “dormancy” is actually a sign of institutional infrastructure working exactly as intended. Highlighting BlackRock’s BUIDL, he notes that the first wave of tokenization was engineered for operational architecture, not daily retail volume:
“Many of the first assets tokenized were funds (VC funds, private funds). Tokenization in these cases was not done to facilitate retail/public trading, but rather to upgrade institutional issuance infrastructure, compliance, and settlement.”
Rather than viewing the report’s data as a permanent limitation, Elyashiv frames these highly controlled, early-stage structures as a mandatory prologue to open secondary markets:
“The next stage as manifested by the NYSE creating a digital (tokenized) exchange venue and Continental and Computershare partnering with Securitize, etc., is bringing the efficiency of the same infrastructure as better rails for public trading... But we are entering that phase.”
2. Robin Nordnes (Raiku): Contextualizing On-Chain Stagnation
Confronted with the data showing that over half of tokenized value is functionally ledger-locked, Robin Nordnes evaluates the finding from an infrastructure standpoint. To Nordnes, the root cause isn’t asset quality, but a fundamental lack of execution predictability on public networks. He points out that traditional allocators require deterministic answers regarding if and when a trade will settle, rather than competing in a volatile, probabilistic mempool.
“The dormancy finding doesn’t surprise me... What we hear consistently from institutional allocators is that they won’t actively manage capital on-chain until they can answer two questions with confidence: will my transaction execute, and when... For passive holding that’s tolerable. For active trading, collateral management or intraday rebalancing, it isn’t.”
Nordnes stresses that introducing predictable infrastructure completely shifts the baseline calculus for institutional adoption far beyond simply saving on network gas fees:
“Predictable execution doesn’t just reduce what you pay to transact, it changes what you’re willing to do at all. That’s the shift that allows serious allocators to treat on-chain venues as primary infrastructure rather than a parallel experiment... blockspace auction revenue as a yield source only makes sense if the underlying blockspace market has pricing integrity...”
3. Fred Hsu (D3): A Map of Experimental Asset Classes
Addressing the specific finding that only 1 out of 12 asset classes (U.S. Treasuries) has achieved genuine production-grade maturity, Fred Hsu looks at the data as a targeted, multi-trillion-dollar opportunity:
“Only treasuries have reached production grade so far, and almost every other class is still concentrated or experimental. That looks like a weakness, but it is really a map of where the value is. The classes that never matured are the fragmented, illiquid markets traditional finance never priced well... The infrastructure that finally reaches those markets is what decides where the next phase of growth comes from.”
4. Raj Kamal (TransFi): The Parallel Success of Stablecoins
When asked whether the report’s metrics prove that institutional RWAs are failing, Raj Kamal points to the broader tokenized landscape to argue that a highly functional market is already thriving via fiat-backed assets:
“In my view, the real RWA tokenization that is solving real world problems is stablecoins. Where there is a tokenization happening of a real world asset - the US dollar. Through USDC and USDT, billions of dollars of stablecoins are making remittances, B2B flows, payroll & freelancer payments...”
Instead of viewing these metrics as a structural failure for the broader ecosystem, Kamal emphasizes that the highest-velocity use cases for tokenization are scaling rapidly outside of traditional, closed ledgers:
“The reality is that we are just scratching the surface of the multi-trillion dollar traditional payments that is likely to move on to stablecoins. We should be celebrating this clear game changer in global payments as proof of RWAs working.”
5. Edwin Mata (Brickken): Shifting Focus to the Access Layer
Concluding the analysis, Edwin Mata looks directly at the baseline data and validates the current state of the landscape as a natural phase in the technology lifecycle:
“These numbers make sense and reflect the current state of the market, tokenization is still early in institutional adoption and that’s how it was supposed to be. The first phase was always about trust: proving the tech works, meeting regulatory bars... That groundwork isn’t wasted time but rather the foundation on which everything else will be built.”
For Mata, the current multi-billion dollar stagnation highlights exactly where the next industry sector winners will emerge:
“As regulation clarifies (Clarity Act or MiCA in Europe is a good example) and infrastructure matures, the winners will ultimately be whoever builds the access layer: discovery, interoperability layers, the infrastructure that turns a tokenized asset from a static record into something businesses and institutions can actually rely and build on.”
Coming Next Week: The Big Dissect
If you want to hear these findings broken down even further, make sure to tune in next week. We have a massive, exclusive podcast episode dropping featuring heavyweight voices from S&P Global and Franklin Templeton as they sit down to fully dissect the data, compliance methodologies, and the institutional path forward. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Working on Edition 2
The structural shift from static issuance to active utility forms the backbone of our next deep dive. The BeInCrypto Intelligence team is already working on the next installment of our research series: Tokenisation 2026 & Beyond: The Infrastructure Opportunity.
Edition 2 will focus heavily on:
Tokenized Treasuries: Mapping the evolution of the market’s only production-grade asset class.
Reserve Quality: Analyzing the asset backing and legal security anchoring top products.
DeFi Risk: Evaluating smart contract vulnerabilities and systemic liquidity constraints.
We shape each edition with a small group of strategic partners. Want to collaborate or share your data? Talk to the team to learn how you can get involved.
Podcast of the Week: The 90% MiCA Wipeout
With Europe’s game-changing MiCA regulation officially taking full effect this week, the data is brutal: roughly 2,700 crypto firms have been compressed into just 210 fully licensed CASPs—a staggering 90% collapse. In our latest episode, I sit down with three major insiders—Tesseract Group CEO James Harris, Wincent Head of APAC Ryan J. Miller, and European Ethereum Institute Senior Policy Lead Vyara Savova—to dissect who is genuinely ready, who is pretending, and why a 20-person shop now faces the same crushing compliance burden as a global exchange. From how banks are moving to dominate stablecoins to how DeFi vaults are being completely rebuilt to be compliant by design, this is the ultimate playbook on the world’s hardest crypto crackdown.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Have a great weekend,
Brian
Good content.