In just over two years, $1.2 billion (Matteo). Three years after the estimated combined Transaction Value of Tokenised Real World Assets is $25 billion, the range of estimates for this potential combination has increased to $100 billion (US), based on various methodologies of estimating the possible Transaction Values of tokenised RWA assets.
Anyone that is following the evolution of Digital On Chain All Ledger Assets and all the benefits that these innovations provide for the future of digital financial instruments (FI) related to digital on-chain all ledger assets needs to understand the origin of those transaction values and the potential future impact of those transaction values on the future of digital financial instruments as it relates to digital on-chain all ledger assets.
RWA has been tracking all types of reference assets (i.e., everything on Public Blockchains), and recently they have seen substantial growth to track tokenized reference asset values (RWA) - the total value ($USD as of January 2023) for those assets has gone from $1.0B in on chain value at the start of January 2023 to $25.26B by the beginning of Q1 2026 (using historic data).
The value of the tokenized RW market (excluding Stablecoins) at the end of 2025 was estimated at over $36B (note that these different estimates are determined by the criteria on how each agency tracks things). A key reason why tracking agencies both give different values is that one agency will have a definition of on-chain asset that allows for permissioned/institutional platforms and another agency will define as on-chain any asset that's on a public blockchain (other than stablecoins). Also since there is a huge difference in how the agencies define what can/will be included as "on-chain" value, it therefore drastically affects the total amount of stated value that is in the public blockchain ecosystem.
The following are the three primary factors contributing to the growth (over 2000%) of the Tokenized Reference Asset (RWA) Market since the beginning of 2019:
The way that the RWA market is divided by asset class on-chain is very broad; with Treasuries being the highest at over $10B (in tokenized value) on-chain (in early 2026), driven by a combination of Ondo Finance, Circle's USDC and BlackRock's BUIDL fund. Gold is the next highest class of RWA and its on-chain tokenized value has grown to $5.9B (led by PAXG and XAUT). Private credit (inclusive of structured loans, SME financing and trade receivables) has over $4B of RWAs deployed on-chain following DeFi lending standards. Tokenized equity products have exploded to over $963M and have increased 2900% YoY, so it can reasonably be assumed that the fastest growing asset class of RWA is only just beginning to create its foundation. In addition, the imbalance of $379.96B is an opportunity to investigate many RWAs that have not yet been distributed on-chain ($25.26B).
Centrifuge's COO Jürgen Blumberg states that the projected market for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs)—valued at USD 100 billion—is sourced from companies actively marketing and deploying RWAs. RWA valuations are expected to double (over 30% per year) over the next four years, creating growth potential of roughly USD 50 billion per year. Moreover, at least 50% of the world's 20 largest institutional asset management firms will have launched tokenized RWAs by the end of 2026. There is no better indicator of RWAs becoming mainstream than the actions of the large institutional players who continue to adopt them. Consumers purchasing stable coins are increasingly looking for on-chain yield generation opportunities through tokenized indices, stocks, and structured credit instruments as evident by growing demand.
Additionally, Tether's CEO Paolo Ardoino previously commented that numerous banks are expected to move out of their testing/development phases into full production environments in 2026 because of the efficiencies gained from implementing tokenized products within their business models—efficiencies that cannot be ignored. Hashdex's CIO Samir Kerbage dismissed any notion that 2026's projected USD 400 billion in tokenized asset valuations is mere wishful thinking or wishful thinking; rather, Samir expressed that each of these numbers represents specific observable behaviours by existing financial institutions today.
Ethereum dominates the on-chain RWA market due to the smart contract depth of its network, ERC-3643 compliant infrastructure and the aggregated concentration of DeFi protocols that utilize tokenized assets as collateral and yield inputs. Currently, approximately 65% of all publicly available on-chain RWA value is held on Ethereum, meaning the expansion of the on-chain RWA market is a growth story for both Ethereum utility and fee business. The creation of private credit pools via DeFi lending infrastructure, the issuance of tokenized Treasury products on Ethereum, and the issuance of tokenized equity positions all create active demand for transaction processing within the Ethereum network. While the institutional network effects and compliance architecture of Ethereum have been able to maintain Ethereum's lead through this recent period of market expansion, other secondary chains (e.g., Solana, Polygon, Avalanche) have been increasing their RWA total value locked on their respective networks.
McKinsey has projected that by 2030, the total market for RWA tokenization will reach $2 trillion in their conservative scenario. Meanwhile, BCG has projected a $10 trillion bull market in the same time period. In addition, Ripple and BCG predict that tokenized RWAs will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53% from about $600 billion in 2025 to $18.9 trillion by 2033.
Finally, The Security Token Market predicts that by the end of the decade, the total potential size of the security token market will be as high as $30 trillion. These projections are not converging on an average, and there is a wide range since there are huge variations among jurisdictions relating to infrastructure maturity, regulatory development and the speed of adoption. Regardless, every major institutional participant looking at this marketplace today uses the lower end of this range as an assumption in their planning rather than something optimistic; they are still looking at a market that will be around 100 times larger than it is today.
While the overall size of the Tokenized Real World Asset (rwa) market appears to be quite large—worth approximately $36 billion at the end of 2025, at least based on publicly available value estimates—there is a fundamentally broken structure that these market figures represent. Chain fragmentation is already having a significant impact on the tokenized rwa market, producing quantifiable market inefficiencies like 1–3% price disparity for identical assets and 2–5% friction associated with transferring value across chains.
The level of fragmentation currently exists at the chain-protocol level, which means the same tokenized rwa on Ethereum will be treated as a separate asset from the same tokenized rwa on Solana with each having its independent liquidity. As a result, the entire market will not be able to obtain the depth and level of efficiency needed to attract the next wave of large amounts of institutional investment capital to the tokenized rwa industry. There are currently ongoing efforts to create infrastructure for cross-chain interoperability in order to help resolve this issue; however, fragmentation has been widely recognised as one of the biggest outstanding engineering and governance challenges in the industry as we continue to move through the remainder of 2026 and into the future.
The rise in the RWA on-chain TVL supports the value proposition of crypto rather than just being a parallel trend. Billions of dollars of tokenised real-world assets are being added to public blockchains at the same time, increasing the amount of collateral in the DeFi lending markets, generating income from platforms that utilize smart contracts, and proving that the blockchain infrastructure supports institutional users.
There is likely no more data-validated structural trend within crypto than the growth of the RWA market over the last 3 years from $1.2 billion to $36 billion. Its trajectory toward $100 billion by the end of the year, along with DeFi's initial rise in 2020, represents one of the obvious on-chain growth stories in the space; however, this growth is being driven by government bond yields and BlackRock's balance sheets rather than the speculative token incentives that fuelled last cycle's bull run.
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