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.

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.

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.

Market context: value in Treasuries, users in stocks

Tokenized RWAs, excluding stablecoins, reached $38.5 billion on September 29, 2026, up from roughly $6.4 billion at the end of 2024. Most of the value is still in low-risk yield: tokenized Treasury funds hold $14.7 billion, led by Circle’s USYC, Ondo’s USDY and BlackRock’s BUIDL at $2.3 billion to $2.4 billion each, 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 4.0 million holders, most of the 4.9 million people who hold any tokenized RWA, and holder numbers rose 63 percent in the last 30 days. Value sits in Treasuries and credit; people arrive through stocks. That split matches what the guests described.

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.

Shares of RWA episodes by theme, 2026:

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.

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.

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. 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.

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 8 percent over the last 30 days even as holder counts rose, a reminder that onchain supply still follows offchain demand.

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.

Where the guests disagree

Your own chain or a shared one. Robinhood, Pharos and ZIGChain run their own layer 1s 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.

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. The difference matters more as retail volumes grow.

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, never mentioned one: to them the asset is the product and the chain is plumbing.

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.

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.

Methodology

Appendix: the 31 episodes