The market capitalization of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) has reached $50.3 billion — 10.3 times more than three years ago. Investors gain access to U.S. government debt yields and shares of major companies through the blockchain, but their investments depend directly on the reliability of issuers and the liquidity of individual tokens.
RWA are bonds, funds, stocks, and other traditional assets whose rights are issued as tokens. The largest market segment is U.S. Treasury bills (short-term government bonds) at $13.6 billion. Yield strategies ($11.4 billion) and credit funds ($8.3 billion) follow. With such tokens, stablecoin holders can earn interest income without moving money out of the blockchain.
Ethereum and stock tokens: where the market is concentrated
Ethereum remains the main blockchain for RWA: $20.9 billion in assets are hosted on it. BNB Chain is in second place with $6.2 billion, Solana is third with $4.8 billion. Together, these three networks account for 63.4% of the market, so outages or rising fees on them can affect most holders.
The largest issuer is Ondo with $4 billion, Sky has $3.9 billion, and Securitize has $3.4 billion. Their combined share is only 22.5%, so the market is not locked into a single provider. However, each token remains an obligation of a specific issuer, so an investor should choose it as carefully as a bank or a broker.
Tokenized stocks are the most active segment. Over 30 days, their turnover on decentralized exchanges (DEX) reaches $12.4 billion, which is 7.5 times more than tokenized funds and commodity assets combined. The number of their transfers on the blockchain over the past 24 hours was 7 million.
Nvidia (NVDAx) and Coinbase (COINx) stock tokens accounted for 27.9% of all transfers, although only 850 assets are in circulation in total. Demand is concentrated in a few popular securities, so other tokens may have noticeably fewer buyers and sellers. For a retail investor, this is a tangible practical risk: buying a stock token is easy, but selling it quickly at a fair price is not always possible.
Cryptalist analysis: The tenfold growth of the RWA market over three years confirms the transition of tokenization from an experimental phase to infrastructure: the dominance of U.S. Treasury bills reflects demand for "risk-free" yield within the blockchain. The concentration of 63.4% of market capitalization in three networks and the high turnover of a narrow group of stock tokens create a structural vulnerability — liquidity is distributed unevenly. For institutional participants, the key factor for further growth is not the volume of issuance, but the quality of issuer underwriting and the depth of the secondary market.