State of Tokenization: what 31 founder interviews say changed in real-world assets, 2025 to 2026

Crypto Coin Show published 161 founder and executive interviews between January 1, 2025 and September 29, 2026. This report reads all of them for one subject, the tokenization of real-world assets, and asks what founders were actually putting onchain and how that changed from one year to the next. This October 6, 2026 edition refreshes the market data, adds a company by company section on the 2026 guests, and folds in the first October episode, in which a bank infrastructure builder described tokenized deposits being tested behind closed doors.

The short answer is that tokenization moved from exotic assets to familiar ones. In 2025 the typical RWA guest was tokenizing something that had never traded easily: a rental property, a diamond, a commodity shipment or a startup’s private shares. In 2026 the typical guest was putting assets that already have a market price onchain, such as US stocks, ETFs, Treasury funds and credit, and competing on who can get them to users.

Who this is for: allocators, founders and policy readers who want to know what the people building tokenization said on the record in 2025 and 2026, how those claims compare with the onchain data as of October 2026, and which questions to ask before backing or building an RWA product.

Tokenization by the numbers

Key metrics

The dataset

The desk screened every episode by hand, starting from the archive’s RWA & Tokenization tag and a keyword search of each episode’s show notes, key takeaways and transcript. An episode is counted when tokenizing a real-world or traditional financial asset is its main subject or a significant part of the product being discussed. Episodes that only mention RWAs in passing are excluded, as are episodes about crypto token launches, tokenized AI models, NFTs or loyalty points, which use the word tokenization but do not put an outside asset onchain. That leaves 31 episodes: 14 from 2025 and 17 from 2026.

Measured against the whole show, RWA conversations made up 16 percent of episodes in 2025 and 23 percent in 2026 to date. The CCS Interview Index put the 2026 figure at 38 percent using the automatic tag alone. Most of that gap comes from the sponsor read in recent video descriptions, which mentions RWA tokenization and caused the tagger to label unrelated AI and infrastructure episodes as RWA. Hand screening removed them.

For this October update the desk kept the 31-episode core dataset and its percentages unchanged, so that the year on year comparison stays clean. Four further 2026 conversations are drawn on in the company section because they bear directly on the thesis even though RWAs were not their main subject: Fhenix on confidentiality for institutional issuers, Algorand on a public chain repositioning around regulated finance, Nexus Labs on where institutions issue first, and Kresus, published October 5, on what banks are testing in private. They are listed separately at the end of the appendix.

Market context: value in Treasuries, users in stocks

Tokenized RWAs, excluding stablecoins, stood at $38.8 billion on October 6, 2026, up from roughly $6.4 billion at the end of 2024 and $18 billion to $26 billion at the end of 2025, depending on which tracker is used. The total has flattened over the last month, down 1.2 percent in 30 days. Most of the value is still in low-risk yield: tokenized Treasury funds hold $14.8 billion, led by Circle’s USYC at $2.40 billion, Ondo’s USDY at $2.29 billion, BlackRock’s BUIDL at $2.25 billion, Franklin Templeton’s iBENJI at $1.71 billion and WisdomTree’s WTGXX at $1.23 billion. Tokenized private credit adds $8.0 billion of active loans, with STOKR, Maple, Hastra, Centrifuge and Realiz the five largest venues, and gold tokens such as XAUT and PAXG add several billion more.

The users are somewhere else. Tokenized stocks are a much smaller pool at $3.2 billion, but they account for about 4.26 million holders, most of the 5.14 million people who hold any tokenized RWA, and the stock holder count rose 53 percent in the 30 days to October 5. Value sits in Treasuries and credit; people arrive through stocks. That split matches what the guests described. It also helps explain why tokenized Treasury value fell 6.6 percent in a month while holder counts rose: the Treasury products are held by a few tens of thousands of wallets, 86,085 as of October 6, mostly institutions and protocols parking cash, and their balances move with rates and with how much DeFi collateral demand there is at any moment.

Six findings

1. Tokenization moved from exotic assets to familiar ones

Half of the 2025 RWA episodes were about tokenizing physical goods or private shares. Lingo paid token holders from rental property income, Fermion Protocol built a verifier network for high-value physical goods, Thesaurum tokenized diamonds from its own mine in Liberia, D.Energy had validators stake renewable energy, and Polymath and Vex Capital tokenized private company equity. In 2026 those themes fell to 6 percent, a single episode on critical minerals from SAGINT.

Episodes about assets that already trade, meaning public stocks, ETFs, Treasury funds and credit, went the other way, from 21 percent of RWA conversations in 2025 to 59 percent in 2026. The market data agrees with the archive. Of the $38.8 billion onchain on October 6, Treasury funds, private credit and stocks together account for roughly $26 billion, while tokenized real estate is counted at under $100 million by RWA.xyz, with its largest single asset at $92 million. The guests who were tokenizing property and diamonds in 2025 were early to a category that has not yet attracted capital at scale.

Shares of RWA episodes by theme, 2026:

Where the onchain value sits, October 2026 (RWA.xyz, excluding stablecoins):

2. Tokenized stocks became the retail front door

One 2025 episode, Roxom, planned tokenized stocks priced in Bitcoin. In 2026 five guests talked about putting stocks in front of ordinary users. Robinhood’s Johann Kerbrat said Robinhood Chain passed $1.6 billion in total value locked within months of its July launch, and that Robinhood built its own chain to control compliance by jurisdiction, cap gas fees and trade tokenized stocks around the clock. Trust Wallet added bStocks, tokenized US shares such as NVDA and TSLA that trade 24/7 in a self-custody wallet with dividends handled onchain. NSDQ ETF COIN built a security token backed by Nasdaq ETF shares with a $500 minimum. Nexo US said money market funds were the early stage and that everyone is waiting for tokenized equities, and Veera put gold tokens inside a consumer neobank app.

The policy backdrop moved with them. On March 18, 2026 the SEC approved a Nasdaq rule change that lets a DTCC-run pilot settle Nasdaq trades in tokenized form on the same order book as ordinary shares, with identical shareholder rights, following the SEC’s December 2025 authorisation of DTCC’s tokenization pilot. That is the regulated path for US investors. The 4.26 million holders RWA.xyz counts today are overwhelmingly outside the US: bStocks are geofenced away from the US, UK and EU, and Robinhood’s stock tokens launched for European customers. The front door is open, but in most of the world it is not the American door.

3. RWAs became the yield engine behind other products

Credit, Treasuries and yield doubled from 14 to 29 percent of RWA episodes, and the 2026 guests mostly used RWAs as an ingredient rather than the product. OpenTrade generates money-market and other RWA-backed returns on stablecoin balances for fintechs. Ground embeds onchain yield into neobanks through one API and said money market funds were the first assets to arrive. Buck brings Strategy’s STRC preferred stock onchain as a savings token targeting 10 percent. Cap is building onchain private credit for smaller borrowers that large lenders ignore, and CMT Digital pointed to Figure’s onchain loans and SBA-backed loans becoming DeFi collateral. This is the same pattern our stablecoin report found from the other side: stablecoins move the dollars, tokenized Treasuries and credit pay the yield.

The numbers back the ingredient framing. Tokenized Treasuries at $14.8 billion and private credit at $8.0 billion are together about 59 percent of all tokenized RWA value, yet they have only around 284,000 holders between them (86,085 for Treasuries and 197,844 for credit, RWA.xyz, October 6). Those are wholesale balances, held by protocols, funds and fintech treasuries, and then re-packaged into something a consumer sees as a savings rate.

4. Distribution beat technology

The 2026 guests were blunt that putting an asset onchain is the easy part. Abdul Rafay Gadit of ZIGChain broke tokenization into four pieces, origination of yield, technology, regulation and distribution, and called the technology the most commoditized of them; ZIGChain says it has a $5 billion pipeline including Apex Group and UAE small-business credit. Robinhood built a chain to control its own distribution and compliance rather than rely on someone else’s. Kresus’s Dr Jordan Knecht, speaking in October, said the same thing from the bank side: minting the token is simple, and the work is liquidity, custody, settlement and plugging into core banking systems. In 2025, Centrifuge described the opposite problem: institutions that had spent years experimenting on private blockchains suddenly wanted to tokenize something “today or this week.” The question moved from whether to tokenize to who owns the customer.

The tokenized stock league table makes the point. Ondo, bStocks and xStocks hold $2.4 billion between them with thousands of listed assets, but the 189 Robinhood stock tokens, at $144 million, sit on a chain that generated about $39 million in fees between its July 1 launch and September 8, according to Bernstein analysis reported by The Block. The venue with the smallest tokenized stock balance is the one making the most money, because it owns the app, the user and the fee switch.

5. Liquidity is the unsolved problem

Several guests said the hard part starts after issuance. Misha Putiatin of Symbiotic said most tokenized RWAs still take 60 to 180 days to redeem and pitched same-day settlement without pre-funded inventory. Vex Capital said private-market investors only see a price every one to two years and uses auctions to create one. Pharos Network argued institutions care about finality and reliability more than transaction speed. The market data points the same way: tokenized Treasury funds fell 6.6 percent over the 30 days to October 6 even as holder counts rose, a reminder that onchain supply still follows offchain demand.

Putiatin’s 60 to 180 day figure needs one qualification. It describes private credit funds and interval-style products, not tokenized Treasury funds, which typically redeem at T+1 or faster. When Symbiotic took its Liquid Lane product live on Centrifuge in August 2026, the funds it covered moved from T+1 (Janus Henderson’s JAAA and JTRSY) and T+3 to T+5 (New York Life’s HYB) to same-day settlement, according to Symbiotic’s August 19 announcement. The redemption problem is real, but it is concentrated in credit and alternatives, which is exactly where the 2026 guests said the yield is.

6. The trust layer showed up

Security, data and legal conversations went from none of the 2025 RWA episodes to 18 percent in 2026. CertiK’s Hudson Jameson said the link between a real-world asset and its token needs its own security layer against spoofing. Space and Time described institutions minting RWAs based on offchain balances that smart contracts cannot yet verify. Dave Rodman of The Rodman Law Group expects RWA tokenization to be “pretty vanilla” legally because existing securities law fits it well. That echoes Polymath’s Vince Kadar in 2025: tokenizing equity or real estate still requires full securities compliance, and the blockchain does not get around it.

Two adjacent 2026 conversations extend the trust layer in a direction the core dataset does not capture. Guy Itzhaki of Fhenix argued that institutions will not put sensitive positions on a transparent ledger, and that confidentiality has to coexist with KYC and AML rather than replace it. Charles Hoskinson made a similar point about transparency by design in his Clarity Act episode. The trust layer that appeared in 2026 is not only about proving an asset exists; it is also about hiding who holds it from everyone except the regulator.

The companies building it: 2026 on the show

Fourteen 2026 conversations carry most of the weight in this report. For each, this section sets out what the company builds, what the founder or executive told Crypto Coin Show, one or two facts the desk could verify independently, and how the claim holds up against the market data. Company figures quoted from the interview are the guest’s own and are labelled as such.

Robinhood Chain: own the chain, own the customer

Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum layer 2 built on Offchain Labs’ Arbitrum stack, live on mainnet since July 1, 2026 with Uniswap, Morpho, Chainlink, BitGo and Paxos among launch partners (Decrypt, updated September 5, 2026). Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s SVP and general manager of crypto, told CCS on September 29 that the chain had reached $1.6 billion in TVL, that fees are capped at 30 cents, that 190 stock tokens were live and that more than 70 percent of stock token trading happens outside exchange hours. He said Robinhood wanted a chain “hyperfocused on real world assets” and built its own to set compliance rules jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

Independent data is close but not identical. Bernstein, cited by The Block on September 8, put TVL at $1.5 billion, cumulative fees since launch at about $39 million with roughly 90 percent going to Robinhood, and tokenized stock value at $140 million; RWA.xyz showed 189 stock tokens worth $144 million on October 5. The chain out-earning Solana and BNB Chain on fees over a 15 day window in September is the clearest evidence in this report that distribution, not issuance, is where tokenization makes money. The weak spot is the same one the data shows for the whole category: stock tokens are a small slice of the chain, and most of the TVL is stablecoins and DeFi collateral.

Trust Wallet: tokenized stocks inside a self-custody wallet

Shehram Khattak, general counsel at Trust Wallet, told CCS on July 3 that the wallet had passed 220 million downloads across more than 100 chains, had done over $1 billion of perpetuals volume in its first 40 days on Hyperliquid, and had added bStocks, perps and prediction markets without taking custody or executing orders itself. He asked regulators to “leave some space for experimentation.” Trust Wallet’s June 12, 2026 announcement confirms the mechanics: bStocks are BEP-20 tokens on BNB Smart Chain backed one to one by shares at a regulated custodian, launched with Tesla, Circle, Micron, SanDisk and Nvidia, dividends reinvested into the token balance net of US withholding tax, zero platform fees, and no availability in the US, UK or EU. By October 5 RWA.xyz counted 87 bStocks assets worth $855 million, the second largest tokenized stock venue after Ondo. Khattak’s framing, the wallet as distribution layer rather than issuer, is the purest version of finding four in the dataset.

NSDQ ETF COIN: an index inside a security token

Kaloyan Iliev, CEO of NSDQ ETF COIN, opened the 2026 RWA calendar on January 15 with a security token backed by Nasdaq index ETF shares held in a regulated fund structure: a $500 minimum, 24/7 trading against T+2 in the legacy fund, Regulation D and S exemptions obtained in October 2025, a January 2026 private sale, a planned security token offering in the second quarter and a mobile app by late 2026 or early 2027. The desk could not verify issuance volumes or a completed listing as of October 6, and NSDQ does not appear among the top tokenized stock venues on RWA.xyz, so its figures remain company statements. The episode matters for its structure: an exempt offering of a fund-backed security token is the cautious, US-compatible path, a different animal from the offshore bStocks and xStocks model that holds most retail users today, and the shape the SEC-approved Nasdaq pilot is meant to test from the inside.

Buck: a preferred share turned into a savings coin

Dan Hillery, head of treasury at Buck, explained on April 8 how BUCK targets 10 percent by holding Strategy’s STRC perpetual preferred, which adjusts its monthly dividend to stay near $100 par and sits on a balance sheet he described as three to six times overcollateralized by Bitcoin. He said STRC had held near par through a four month period in which Bitcoin fell about 45 percent, that Buck had raised its rate from 7 to 10 percent, and that V2 routes the yield stream into Pendle and Morpho. The Block reported on March 4, 2026 that Strategy raised STRC’s dividend rate to 11.5 percent and that Benchmark’s Mark Palmer called the instrument the backbone of a set of yield-backed stablecoin protocols, naming Buck alongside Saturn Labs and Apyx. Buck is the clearest example of finding three: the real-world asset is a listed US security and the product the user sees is a savings rate. Hillery did not hide the risk: every such token depends on one issuer continuing to pay a dividend it funds by selling more securities.

Cap: private credit underwritten by markets, not committees

Benjamin Sarquis Peillard, founder and CEO of Cap, told CCS on May 26 that private credit is a $1.7 trillion market with trust and incentive problems, that only around 20 borrowers in crypto lending operate at scale, and that Celsius and BlockFi failed because crypto teams tried to underwrite credit themselves. Cap’s answer is a three party model in which underwriters stake collateral against loans and are liquidated if a borrower defaults, so risk is priced by a market rather than a committee. Cap raised an $11 million seed led by Franklin Templeton in April 2025 (Fortune, April 7, 2025), and The Defiant reported on June 18, 2026 that its CAP token auction drew 1,002 bids and $16.4 million of commitments, 5.5 times oversubscribed, at a $106 million fully diluted valuation. Cap is one of the few 2026 guests describing new credit origination rather than wrapping an existing fund, which matters when tokenized private credit sits at $8.0 billion and has been flat for a month.

Symbiotic: making tokenized funds redeemable the same day

Misha Putiatin, co-founder and CEO of Symbiotic, said on July 1 that most tokenized RWAs take 60 to 180 days to redeem, that Symbiotic had put about $300 million to work in underwriting applications on its first version, and that Core V2 lets vault capital stay enforceable while deployed into Morpho and Euler. Its Liquid Lane product uses a request for quote engine so holders can exit a tokenized fund at T+0 without anyone pre-funding an inventory. On August 19, 2026 Symbiotic announced Liquid Lane live for three Centrifuge-tokenized funds with a combined $1.6 billion of assets, Janus Henderson’s JAAA and JTRSY and New York Life Investment Management’s HYB, with Amber as market maker and KPK as curator; earlier announcements covered Midas and OpenEden’s tokenized BNY high yield bond fund. This is finding five turning from a complaint into a product, and it reframes the Treasury data: the $14.8 billion that is already liquid did not need it, the $8.0 billion in credit did.

ZIGChain: tokenomics for the asset and the chain

Abdul Rafay Gadit, co-founder and chief commercial officer of ZIGChain, laid out the four part framework on July 29: yield origination, technology, regulation and distribution, with technology the most commoditized. He said ZIGChain, a Cosmos SDK layer 1 with EVM compatibility that grew out of Zignaly’s 600,000 users, had a $5 billion RWA pipeline including Apex Group, had distributed about $70 million of UAE small-business private credit in three months at 9 to 10 percent to end users, and was Shariah certified. His line that most RWA projects “tokenize the asset and forget the token” is the sharpest disagreement with the institutional guests in this dataset. The Defiant reported on August 5, 2026 that Laser Digital, Nomura’s digital assets arm, bought ZIG tokens for an undisclosed sum and agreed to oversee risk on ZIG Markets’ onchain private credit pipeline, which had originated more than $50 million with no defaults reported. Where founder claim and public record differ is scale: a $5 billion pipeline against $50 million to $70 million originated. Pipelines are not originations.

Pharos Network: a layer 1 built for institutional finality

Wish Wu, co-founder and CEO of Pharos Network, told CCS on March 26 that his team came from Ant Group’s Ant Chain, that the testnet had processed 3 to 4 billion transactions from roughly 300 million accounts, and that institutions want “real-time finality,” which he argued a layer 2 depending on Ethereum consensus cannot promise. Pharos launched its Pacific Ocean mainnet and PROS token on April 28, 2026, a month after the interview; The Defiant reported a $44 million Series A, $52 million raised in total, a valuation near $1 billion anchored by Hong Kong listed GCL New Energy, a $50 million RWA vault filled within days, and 4.3 billion testnet transactions across 209 million wallets. Pharos is the strongest 2026 case for the own-chain side of the disagreement below; the counterpoint comes from Nexus Labs and Kresus, who told CCS that institutions still default to Ethereum first.

SAGINT: the one physical-asset episode of 2026

Mike Weeks, executive chairman and co-founder of SAGINT, was the only 2026 guest tokenizing a physical commodity, and he separated what SAGINT does from crypto. He described a traceability and settlement stack for critical minerals aimed at opaque markets, especially central Africa, where the Democratic Republic of Congo supplies around 60 percent of the world’s cobalt, said the word tokenization alone makes counterparties assume speculators, and pointed to US defence procurement rules under DFARS as the demand driver. On January 21, 2026 ReElement Technologies and SAGINT announced a utility token for refined neodymium oxide from ReElement’s Noblesville, Indiana facility, on a privately operated Sui environment, designed as a chain of custody and compliance record. This is tokenization as an audit trail rather than a tradable asset, which is why it appears in no RWA tracker and may matter anyway. The 2025 physical-asset guests wanted liquidity for diamonds and property; the 2026 one wants provenance for cobalt and rare earths. That is a different, more defensible product.

Kresus: what banks are testing in private

Dr Jordan Knecht of Kresus, published October 5 and the newest episode here, said banks look slow on blockchain only because the work is invisible: institutions are running RFPs, testing tokenized deposits and certificates of deposit, and waiting for clarity. He described Kresus as an execution layer for digital assets, pointed to tokenized CD work in the UAE and El Salvador, called this the second wave of RWAs focused on execution rather than issuance, recommended an equities-first strategy, warned against picking a layer 1 too early, and said institutions that wait for a regulatory green light lose “18 to 24 months of build time.” Kresus Labs, founded by Trevor Traina, announced a partnership with South Korea’s Hanwha Investment & Securities on December 11, 2025 covering wallets and tokenization of financial instruments. Knecht’s account is the bank-side mirror of the ZIGChain framework, and his timing matters: the interview followed the CLARITY Act’s 50 to 49 Senate cloture failure on September 15, 2026, and his advice to build anyway is the practical response to it.

CMT Digital: the investor’s view of the plumbing

Sam Hallene, partner at CMT Digital, a 29 year old Chicago trading group that entered crypto in 2013 and has backed more than 100 companies including Circle, Coinbase and ConsenSys, told CCS on March 27 that “2026 is the year crypto becomes boring” in the best sense: infrastructure adopted without a narrative. He cited Figure’s onchain loan origination savings, which he said came in around 150 basis points against an initial projection of 25 to 26, and described stablecoins as a marginal buyer of Treasury bills. Hallene’s framing explains the shape of the data better than any single founder claim: the $38.8 billion onchain is dominated by assets that are boring on purpose, because cost savings in settlement and collateral are the adoption driver, not retail excitement. He is also one of the institutional guests who never mentioned a native token.

Fhenix: confidentiality as the missing institutional feature

Guy Itzhaki, co-founder and CEO of Fhenix, who previously led trusted execution environment work at Intel, told CCS on March 19 that fully homomorphic encryption lets a chain compute on encrypted balances without decrypting them, that trusted hardware is not a safe basis for a decentralized system, and that institutional adoption needs privacy that still allows KYC and AML. He said Fhenix had pivoted from a layer 2 to a coprocessor he called privacy as a service, that eight projects were building on it, that a dual-mode stablecoin takes “four lines of code” to issue, and that mainnet was planned toward the end of 2026. Fhenix’s documentation, as of September 2026, confirms CoFHE live on Arbitrum, Ethereum and Base testnets with mainnet pending, a $7 million seed and $15 million Series A led by Hack VC, a first institutional deployment with Japan’s BIPROGY and confidential RWA issuance work with Nomyx. Fhenix is not in the core dataset, but the argument bears directly on finding six and on why Robinhood and Pharos run their own chains: one reason to control the ledger is to control who sees what is on it.

Algorand: a public chain repositioning around regulated finance

Staci Warden, CEO of the Algorand Foundation, told CCS on March 5 that the network had run six years without downtime, that the Foundation had moved from Singapore to the United States and rebuilt its board, that the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts were the adoption unlocks, and that blockchain was “approaching foundational status” in traditional finance because “clearing is settlement.” The Foundation’s January 14, 2026 release confirms the Delaware move and a board chaired by Abra’s Bill Barhydt with Alex Holmes of United Texas Bank, Michael Mosier, Rebecca Rettig of Jito Labs and Warden, and names Lofty (real estate), Folks Finance (collateralized debt) and Conio (RWA tokenization) as ecosystem examples. Warden’s expectation for the CLARITY Act did not survive the September 15 Senate vote, the clearest case in this report of a founder’s policy expectation overtaken by events. The GENIUS Act, signed July 18, 2025, is the only one of the two that is law.

Nexus Labs: why institutions issue on Ethereum first

Daniel Marin, CEO of Nexus Labs, told CCS on February 20 that Ethereum’s roughly 15 second confirmation latency rules it out for high frequency markets, that Nexus uses zero-knowledge proofs for sub-second blocks, that more than 3 million users had touched its testnet, mostly in Asia, and that its USDX stablecoin would be 101 percent collateralized by Treasuries with the yield recycled into ecosystem applications. He also conceded the point most useful for this report: tokenized assets launch on Ethereum first for reputational reasons and reach other chains later. The Defiant reported on February 18, 2026 that USDX was being built with M0. The desk could not confirm Nexus mainnet or token launch dates as of October 6, so its user figures remain company statements. The own-chain builders in this dataset, Robinhood, Pharos, ZIGChain and Nexus, are all competing for issuance that the issuers themselves say starts somewhere else.

Where the guests disagree

Your own chain or a shared one. Robinhood, Pharos and ZIGChain run their own layer 1s or layer 2s for RWAs. Centrifuge went the other way, spreading one protocol across Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and Avalanche, and Nexus Labs’ Daniel Marin noted in a separate episode that institutions still prefer to issue on Ethereum first. Kresus’s Jordan Knecht told banks in October not to pick a layer 1 prematurely at all. The data sides with no one yet: Robinhood’s chain leads on fees, Ethereum leads on issued value.

What you actually own. Roxom was candid that its first tokenized stocks would behave like shares, with dividends and splits, without the holder appearing on the share registry. NSDQ emphasized that its token is backed by real ETF shares in a regulated fund structure, and the SEC-approved Nasdaq pilot requires tokenized shares to carry identical rights to ordinary ones. bStocks sit in between: one to one share backing at a custodian with dividends reinvested, but geofenced out of the US. The difference matters more as retail volumes grow; 4.26 million holders now own something, and most of them do not own a registry entry.

Does the token matter. ZIGChain argued most RWA projects neglect bringing value back to their own token. The institutional guests, from CMT Digital to Ground to Kresus, never mentioned one: to them the asset is the product and the chain is plumbing. Robinhood has no token at all and is the most profitable chain in the dataset.

How hard is compliance. SAGINT said the word tokenization alone makes counterparties assume it is dealing with crypto speculators, and built its commodity stack around due-diligence rules from day one. Rodman thinks the legal side will turn out to be routine. Algorand’s Warden expected legislation to settle it in 2026; the Senate did not.

Transparency or confidentiality. Most 2025 guests sold tokenization on transparency. In 2026 Fhenix and Charles Hoskinson argued the opposite, that institutions will not expose positions on a public ledger and that privacy with regulator access is a precondition for the next wave. The bank-side guests, Kresus and CMT Digital, did not take a position, which suggests the question is still being worked out inside the institutions themselves.

How we got here: a timeline

What the data means for investors and builders

• Who owns the end customer? The fee data from Robinhood Chain and the user data from bStocks say the value accrues to whoever holds the app relationship, not to the issuer or the chain. An RWA business plan that does not name its distribution channel is a technology plan.
• What is the redemption timeline, in days, in writing? Treasury tokens redeem at T+1 or better; credit and alternatives can run 60 to 180 days unless a liquidity layer such as Symbiotic’s is attached. Ask for the number, then ask who funds the exit.
• What does the holder legally own? A registry entry, a claim on a custodied share, a fund interest, or an economic exposure. Roxom, NSDQ and bStocks each gave a different answer. Rights in a default or a corporate action follow from this and nothing else.
• Where is the asset available, and where is it not? Most of the 4.26 million tokenized stock holders are outside the US, UK and EU because the leading products are geofenced. A product that depends on US retail has to go through the exempt-offering or Nasdaq-pilot route instead.
• Is the yield a wrapper or an origination? Buck, OpenTrade and Ground re-package existing instruments; Cap and ZIGChain originate credit. Wrappers scale faster and carry the issuer’s risk; originations carry underwriting risk and are where the shortage actually is.
• How is the offchain link verified? CertiK and Space and Time both said the oracle between the asset and the token is a separate attack surface. Ask who attests reserves, how often, and what happens onchain when the attestation fails.
• Does the native token need to exist? The most profitable RWA venue in this report has none. If a project’s token is essential to the pitch, ask what it does that a fee switch does not.
• Who can see the position? If the target client is an institution, Fhenix’s and Hoskinson’s point stands: a fully transparent ledger may be a disqualifier. Ask whether confidentiality with regulator access is on the roadmap.
• What is the plan if US market structure law does not arrive? The CLARITY Act failed in September 2026. Kresus’s advice to build within existing rules rather than wait is the realistic baseline for 2027.

What to watch into 2027

If the 2026 pattern holds, the next year of RWA conversations will be about distribution and liquidity rather than issuance: which brokers, wallets and neobanks own the retail customer for tokenized stocks, whether US rules allow those stocks to trade widely onchain, and whether redemption times for tokenized funds and credit come down from months to days. Physical assets such as real estate and commodities are likely to return only once the liquidity problem is solved for the easier assets first.

Glossary

Real-world asset (RWA)

An asset that exists off a blockchain, such as a Treasury bill, a loan, a share or a bar of gold, represented onchain by a token that records ownership or an economic claim.

Distributed value

RWA.xyz’s measure of the value of tokens actually issued onchain and held in wallets, as opposed to the represented value of the whole underlying pool. This report uses distributed value throughout.

Tokenized Treasury fund

A money market style fund holding short-dated US government debt whose shares are issued as tokens, such as BUIDL, USYC or USDY. The largest RWA category by value.

Tokenized stock

A token that tracks or is backed by a listed share or ETF. Structures range from one to one custodied backing (bStocks, xStocks) to fund-backed security tokens (NSDQ) to tokens issued by the broker itself (Robinhood).

Security token

A token that is itself a security under the issuer’s law, typically sold under an exemption such as Regulation D or Regulation S in the US, with transfer restrictions enforced in the token contract.

Redemption time

How long it takes a holder to convert a tokenized fund or credit position back into cash at net asset value. Ranges from same day (T+0) for liquid Treasury tokens to 60 to 180 days for some credit and alternative funds.

Request for quote (RFQ)

A trading method in which a holder asks approved market makers to bid for an exit, used by Symbiotic’s Liquid Lane to settle redemptions at T+0 without a pre-funded inventory.

Perpetual preferred stock

A share class paying a fixed or adjustable dividend with no maturity date. Strategy’s STRC is the example behind Buck’s savings token.

Underwriter (Cap model)

A party that stakes collateral against a specific loan and is liquidated if the borrower defaults, so that credit risk is priced by participants rather than a central team.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)

A cryptographic method that allows computation on encrypted data without decrypting it, used by Fhenix to keep balances and positions confidential on a public chain.

Geofencing

Blocking users in specific jurisdictions at the application layer. bStocks exclude the US, UK and EU; Robinhood’s stock tokens launched for European customers.

DFARS

The Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, the US defence procurement rules whose critical-mineral sourcing requirements SAGINT and ReElement are building provenance tokens to satisfy.

Methodology

Sources

1. RWA.xyz: Tokenized asset dashboard (distributed value, holders), October 6, 2026
2. RWA.xyz: Tokenized US Treasuries, October 6, 2026
3. RWA.xyz: Tokenized stocks, October 5, 2026
4. RWA.xyz: Tokenized private credit, October 6, 2026
5. Stobox: State of RWA Tokenization 2026, September 27, 2026
6. The Block: SEC approves Nasdaq tokenized equities trading pilot, March 18, 2026
7. National Law Review: CLARITY Act fails to advance in the Senate, September 16, 2026
8. LexBlog: Senate adjourns without CLARITY Act vote, September vote on the calendar, August 11, 2026
9. Decrypt: What is Robinhood Chain? The Ethereum layer 2 for tokenized stocks, September 5, 2026
10. The Block: Bernstein sees 31% upside for Robinhood as chain fees top Solana, BNB Chain, September 8, 2026
11. Trust Wallet: Access bStocks on Trust Wallet, July 17, 2026
12. The Defiant: Cap Labs token auction clears at $106M FDV, 5.5x oversubscribed, June 18, 2026
13. Fortune: Cap raises $11 million from Franklin Templeton and others, April 7, 2025
14. Symbiotic: Instant liquidity for Janus Henderson and NYLIM funds on Centrifuge, $1.6B AUM, August 19, 2026
15. The Defiant: Nomura’s Laser Digital backs ZIGChain private credit pipeline, August 5, 2026
16. The Defiant: Pharos launches Pacific Ocean mainnet, April 28, 2026
17. Nasdaq / ReElement Technologies: ReElement and SAGINT mint utility token for critical minerals, January 21, 2026
18. Kresus Labs: Strategic partnership with Hanwha Investment & Securities, December 11, 2025
19. The Block: Strategy’s STRC emerging as backbone of yield-backed stablecoin ecosystem, March 4, 2026
20. PR Newswire / Algorand Foundation: Return to the United States with new board, January 14, 2026
21. Fhenix: Documentation and 2026 status (CoFHE, funding, partners), September 2026
22. The Defiant: Nexus to launch revenue-sharing USDX stablecoin, February 18, 2026
23. Crypto Coin Show: Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood, on why Robinhood built its own chain, September 29, 2026
24. Crypto Coin Show: Dr Jordan Knecht, Kresus, on why banks are building for Web3 in silence, October 5, 2026
25. Crypto Coin Show: Misha Putiatin, Symbiotic, on collateral markets for RWAs, July 1, 2026

Appendix: the 31 episodes

Disclosure: XYO Network is a sponsor of Crypto Coin Show; no XYO episode is counted in this dataset and XYO had no input into this report. Some interviews are produced as part of paid distribution packages. This report is for education only and is not investment, legal or tax advice.