Real World Assets (RWA) have been floating around the crypto universe since around 2015, with mostly conceptual, early experiments. Only now are investors getting excited about them.
Fast forward to 2024 and Wall Street moves on the market with BlackRock launching BUIDL, its digital asset fund. It quickly grew to $500 million in assets under management in 2024 and hit $2 billion in 2025. BlackRock added BUIDL to the Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) blockchain this year, looking to pepper the crypto market with its tokenized Treasury bond fund. BUIDL is on other blockchains, as well.
RWAs will become a bigger play in 2026.
"That's because real-world asset tokenization stands out today as the institutional focus, with BlackRock and JPMorgan actively building in a sector that’s grown to $35 billion," said Jonatan Randin, a trading-focused market analyst at PrimeXBT, an offshore crypto derivatives platform catering to active, high-risk traders.
Ben Elvidge, Head of Commercial Applications at Trilitech, the London-based R&D hub for the Tezos (CRYPTO: XTZ) blockchain, thinks RWAs will continue seeing strong growth in 2026 because of stablecoin regulations in the West.
Elvide said stablecoins and other digitized RWAs are being used "not only for basic issuance but also as collateral, lending assets, and liquidity sources inside decentralized finance programs.".
RWAs: More Products Coming.
Compared with early‑to‑mid 2024, when the tokenized treasuries and RWA fund universe was concentrated in a relatively small set of issuers, the landscape in 2025 includes a broader range of U.S. asset managers and newer fintechs launching multiple funds each.
When BUIDL launched, dozens of distinct tokenized RWA funds followed, with a smaller subset tied to U.S. fund sponsors like BlackRock whose underlying assets are tokenized Treasury bonds. The market was measured in a few billion dollars at that time.
But in 2025, hundreds of new RWA products came to market globally – from real estate to tokenized stocks, tokenized gold, and private credit. Total tokenized RWA value is now in the tens of billions of dollars, with tokenized U.S. treasuries and money‑market funds being the most popular (after basic stablecoins). These tokenized Treasurys allow investors from around the world to buy U.S. fixed income on-chain.
By the third quarter of 2025, the tokenized real-world asset market crossed $30 billion, led by demand from investors seeking yield. Better regulatory pictures in the U.S., Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates helped drive the market, while Wall Street players led by BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Fidelity were the lead steers. At the same time, firms like DBS Bank and Binance expanded their use cases for tokenized RWAs. This market has grown approximately ten-fold since 2022.
Tokenize Everything In 2026?
Some see real world assets moving from tokenization of Treasuries and real estate, to other segments of the economy. Basically, nothing is off-limits. Digital is going everywhere, crypto start-ups tend to believe.
"The rapid tokenization of real-world assets will make everything from energy credits to infrastructure and commodities tradeable on-chain, forcing a shift from politically inflated currencies to digitally collateralized ones," said Nima Beni, CEO of Bitlease.com, a crypto leasing and financing platform. "Crypto will move beyond being just an asset class to become the settlement layer for real economic output. The strongest growth will come from RWA-powered DeFi – like tokenized treasuries, bonds, and private credit – and that will unlock $10 trillion or more in institutional liquidity," Beni said.
RWAs are said to be the perfect combination of traditional finance and blockchain tech, with traditional banking institutions slowly getting into asset tokenization either as fund issuers, or offering these products as portfolio investments to clients.
"Fiat-backed stablecoins operating under clear regulatory frameworks in the U.S. and Europe are best positioned for outsized growth in 2026," said Lux Thiagarajah, Chief Commercial Officer of OpenPayd, a banking-as-a-service platform. "These aren’t speculative assets; they’re already moving trillions of dollars. The opportunity now lies in distribution: enabling any payment service provider, marketplace or financial institution to mint, move and redeem stablecoins through a single licensed API that hides blockchain complexity."
While several crypto projects have been designed with the intention of being outside the scope of U.S. securities laws, the structure of most tokenized RWAs, with an explicit focus on yield generation and appreciation in value, will generally cause them to be treated as securities under the Securities Act of 1933, according to lawyers at Fenwick.
Investors with lower risk tolerance might want to stick to products run by traditional Wall Street names.
Different countries will have different rules.
"We believe the segments with the strongest potential in 2026 will be those that deliver real economic value and the first sector that comes to mind is ‘Realfi', the convergence of real users, real assets, and real yield where blockchain begins to operate much closer to a global neobank infrastructure," said Wish Wu, co-founder of Pharos, a blockchain infrastructure company.
RealFi is short for "Real-World Finance." It refers to blockchain-based financial systems that are directly tied to real-world assets.
The RWA universe is mainly stablecoins, followed by tokenized Treasury bonds. Private credit and real estate, which some have referred to as "the white whale" of tokenization, round out the top four tokenized real-world items.
For OpenPayd's Chief Commercial Officer, three areas will drive expansion next year: real-world payments and cross-border settlement, where businesses are looking for alternatives to high card fees and shrinking correspondent banking networks; on-chain foreign exchange and liquidity, with stablecoins increasingly forming one or both legs of currency trades. Third will be the rise of tokenised real-world assets.
"As regulatory clarity improves, institutional capital can finally enter at scale," said Thiagarajah. "Tokenized assets offer 24/7 settlement, fractional ownership and programmable cashflows, making them a natural bridge between traditional finance and digital assets and positioning the sector to evolve into regulated, high-volume infrastructure."
Still Not Better Than Bitcoin
The RWA story will track the market mood for Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) next year. However, even in bull markets some major protocols in this space have failed to beat BTC.
RWA protocols MakerDAO (CRYPTO: DAO), Ondo Finance (CRYPTO: ONDO) and the Polymesh Network (Crypto: POLYX) underperformed Bitcoin year-to-date ending Dec. 14, and over the last 12 months. At almost no time frame did the governance tokens of those protocols return more to investors than Bitcoin.
"Macro still drives the tempo," said Martins Benkitis, Co-founder and CEO of Gravity Team. Gravity Team supplies the buy and sell orders that keep crypto markets liquid and trading functional.
For 2026, Benkitis said if the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates and ETFs expand beyond mainly owning Bitcoin and Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), "then you'll see a broader risk-on rotation, but this time with more mature liquidity infrastructure underneath it. The days of markets seizing up on every volatility spike are fading."
The writer of this article owns Ethereum, and Bitcoin via the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.
Feature Image Credit: Author
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