Real-world asset tokenization is increasingly shifting the crypto industry’s focus from trading tokens against other tokens to delivering blockchain rails for institutions, according to a 2025 analysis by CoinGecko. The report estimates tokenized treasuries rose by $4.7 billion to $5.5 billion, with BlackRock and Securitize’s BUIDL fund accounting for 45% of the market, underscoring growing demand for digital infrastructure tied to traditional financial assets.
Even as demand grows, researchers warn that tokenizing assets does not automatically translate into deep secondary-market liquidity or broad investor participation. The next battleground, analysts say, is market structure—custody, legal rights, compliance, verification, settlement, and trading workflows that can be integrated into institutional operations.
Key takeaways
- Tokenized treasuries expanded: CoinGecko’s 2025 report says tokenized treasuries grew by $4.7 billion to $5.5 billion.
- Catalyst: Institutional adoption of tokenized money-market and treasury instruments is accelerating, including large players such as BlackRock and Securitize.
- Market implication: Liquidity and transfer activity remain uneven, meaning market structure—not just token issuance—is becoming the core challenge.
- Infrastructure focus: Research highlights that legal and custody frameworks remain largely offchain, keeping RWA systems hybrid.
- Next test area: Commodities may be a clearer proving ground because their value and ownership depend on physical supply chains.
What’s driving the shift to real-world assets
Historically, crypto growth centered on creating and exchanging digital tokens, often with liquidity and pricing tied to speculative narratives. More recently, industry attention has moved toward embedding economic value into blockchain settlement, where digital instruments represent claims on assets already embedded in traditional finance.
CoinGecko’s 2025 RWA report points to tokenized treasuries as the clearest institutional use case. The analysis attributes a large share of that growth to BlackRock and Securitize’s BUIDL fund, suggesting that tokenization gains traction when it aligns with established institutional workflows such as custody, compliance, and settlement.
In this framework, the question is less whether blockchain can create brand-new speculative assets, and more whether it can improve the way existing assets are issued, transferred, settled, and accessed by market participants.
Why tokenization is running ahead of market structure
While tokenization has advanced quickly, academic work suggests important gaps remain between putting assets onchain and building fully functioning secondary markets.
A recent study on RWA liquidity argues that tokenizing assets and generating meaningful secondary-market liquidity are distinct outcomes. Many RWA products, the research indicates, still show limited transfer activity and constrained investor participation.
Another 2026 paper reaches a similar conclusion, framing RWA systems as hybrid by nature. Even if blockchain tokens can support transfer, redemption, pricing, and composability, the underlying legal rights, custody arrangements, compliance requirements, and verification processes still rely on offchain frameworks. That dependency keeps market design and operational integration—rather than pure technical issuance—at the center of the rollout challenge.
The implication for institutions is that tokenized products require more than a digital wrapper. They need connected infrastructure that can reconcile ownership, support verifiable custody, handle compliance and reporting, and enable trading and settlement in ways that match regulated workflows.
Commodities as the proving ground
Commodities are presented as a particularly meaningful stress test because their value is not confined to crypto cycles. Physical metals, energy products, and industrial materials sit within real supply chains, balance sheets, and global trade.
Tokenizing exposure could make these assets easier to transfer or fractionally access, but it does not eliminate core operational issues, including where the commodity is held, how inventory is verified, how ownership is represented, and what market structure exists around the instrument.
As a result, commodities may reveal whether RWA infrastructure can deliver credible issuance and settlement at scale, not just headline growth in tokenized balances.
Market-builders focus on infrastructure rather than promotion
Ault Blockchain is positioning itself around the idea that institutions will need an “operating layer” for tokenized assets—covering custody verification, reconciliable ownership records, trading rails capable of settlement onchain, and governance structures suited to financial infrastructure rather than startup experimentation.
The project describes an EVM-compatible layer 1 aimed at trading, settlement, and tokenized real-world asset infrastructure, and it emphasizes that its goal is broader market construction around settlement and licensed infrastructure participation—not solely asset issuance.
Ault also states that the network is designed without a public token sale, using a ten-year declining emissions model tied to licensed infrastructure participation and verifiable network work. The company further reports that more than 750,000 licensed mining node licenses have been reserved or allocated.
Beyond any single project, the broader industry push remains concentrated in products that institutions already understand well—especially treasuries and money-market instruments—because those products fit existing compliance and operational patterns. Tokenized treasuries may still be small relative to the broader Treasury market, but interest from major financial institutions is increasing as firms explore 24/7 settlement and blockchain-based transfer rails.
What to watch next
The next phase of tokenized finance will likely hinge on whether systems can deliver durable usability: reliable liquidity, verifiable custody, reconciled ownership, and institutional-grade compliance across the full lifecycle from issuance to trading to settlement. Market participants will be watching for developments that address the “hybrid” constraints highlighted by research—especially improvements that make tokenized instruments more transferable and more actively traded, rather than primarily accumulating onchain balances.
