The Real State Of Tokenization: Experts React To The Rwa Market’s Liquidity Problem

What Happened

Access is also limited. The report found that 97% of the market sits outside US retail reach. Only about $1.7 billion is legally accessible to US retail investors.

“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. BUIDL for example, was created for institutional TradFi and DeFi use cases (and this is what it serves)”

Market Context

A new BeInCrypto Intelligence report, built with market data from RWA.xyz and feedback from BeInCrypto’s Expert Council, tracks roughly $60 billion in tokenized real-world assets across more than 7,000 products and 12 asset classes.

The findings show a market that is growing, but still narrow.

Just 62 assets hold 88% of total value. Five products account for roughly half the market: Figure HELOC, Circle USYC, Tether Gold, BlackRock BUIDL, and Justoken JMWH.

Meanwhile, tokenized stocks are growing fast by product count, but the report found that 59% of stock tokens provide synthetic price exposure rather than actual ownership of the underlying shares.

These findings raise a direct question: is tokenization failing to deliver on liquidity, or is the market still in an early infrastructure phase?

Securitize: The First Phase Was Never About Public Trading

Tal Elyashiv, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of SPiCE Venture Capital and Co-Founder of Securitize, said the report’s finding on tokenized equities points to a real structural issue.

Elyashiv also argued that low transfer activity should not be read as failure in every case. Many early tokenized products were designed for institutional issuance, compliance, and settlement, rather than public secondary trading.

“The previous stage needed to succeed and show resilience, as well as regulatory clarity, before moving to the public trading stage. But we are entering that phase.”

The report found that more than half of tokenized market value showed no weekly transfer activity. Nordnes said this is not mainly about asset quality or regulation. He said institutions need predictable execution before they actively manage capital on-chain.

“The dormancy finding doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t think it’s primarily a regulatory story or an asset quality story,” Nordnes asserts. “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.”

That issue becomes more important if tokenized assets are used for active trading, collateral management, or daily fund operations. In those settings, uncertainty around settlement timing can affect spreads, liquidity buffers, and portfolio decisions.

“The transaction fee is actually the smaller part of the problem,” Nordnes explains. “The bigger cost of execution uncertainty is everything that sits around it: the wider spreads you need to run if you can’t guarantee timing, the liquidity buffers you hold because you might not execute when you need to, the positions you simply don’t take because the uncertainty makes the trade unmodelable.”

Why It Matters

For Elyashiv, that first stage had to prove resilience before tokenized assets could move into broader distribution.

D3: The Weak Spots Show Where Growth May Come From

Details

The activity gap is just as stark. Across 1,289 tokenized assets valued above $100,000, 910 assets worth $32.9 billion showed zero weekly transfers.

BeInCrypto asked five industry executives to respond to the report’s findings.

“My stance on what the report shows about tokenizing shares/equity, is that this tokenization needs to be at the source. Tokenization that does not include full ownership is problematic at best, and completely wrong IMHO. This is exactly what Securitize is doing.”

That view matches one of the report’s central distinctions. Some assets are Distributed and can move across public blockchain rails. Others are Represented, using blockchain mainly as a digital record of an off-chain position.

Raiku: Activity Depends on Predictable Execution

Robin Nordnes, CEO and Founder of Raiku, said the dormancy data points to a deeper infrastructure problem.

The report found that only one of 12 asset classes has reached production-grade maturity: US Treasury debt.