Real-World Asset Tokenisation in 2026: Treasuries, Credit and Gold

For years "tokenisation" was the word bankers used at conferences when they wanted to sound modern without committing to anything. That changed quietly. In 2026 the world's largest asset manager, the clearing house behind most US securities settlement and several of Wall Street's oldest fund houses all run live products on public blockchains. The total is still small next to traditional markets, but it is no longer theoretical.

How big is it, really?

Measuring tokenised assets is harder than it sounds, because some tokens are freely transferable onchain while others merely record ownership of assets that live in a bank's system. rwa.xyz, the most widely cited tracker, separates the two. On 14 October 2026 it showed about $39.2 billion of "distributed" assets, the kind that move freely between wallets, and about $259 billion of "represented" assets recorded onchain within closed systems. It counted more than 5.2 million holders of tokenised assets, up 18% in a month. Stablecoins, worth about $293 billion by the same tracker (DefiLlama's broader count was about $306 billion), are counted separately.

Treasuries: the asset that made it work

Government debt led the way because it is simple, liquid and solves an obvious problem: crypto firms holding billions in stablecoins wanted a way to earn interest without leaving the blockchain. Tokenised Treasury funds held about $14.9 billion across 117 products on 14 October 2026, according to rwa.xyz's Treasury dashboard, paying a seven-day yield of about 3.5%.

Two of these funds marked turning points. Franklin Templeton's onchain money fund, launched on Stellar in 2021, was the first US-registered money fund to use a public blockchain as its official record of who owns what. BlackRock's BUIDL, launched in March 2024 with a $5 million minimum and BNY Mellon as custodian, made tokenised funds acceptable to large institutions overnight. We explain how these differ from stablecoins in our guide to tokenised Treasuries and yield-bearing stablecoins.

Private credit: higher yield, harder questions

Tokenised credit is the second-largest category, at about $8.2 billion of distributed value and roughly $37.7 billion in represented form as of mid-October 2026, per rwa.xyz. The biggest platforms include STOKR, Maple, Hastra and Centrifuge. These products offer higher yields because they lend to businesses, trade finance deals or other borrowers who cannot tap bond markets easily.

That yield comes with credit risk, and a blockchain does nothing to make a borrower more likely to repay. What tokenisation does offer is transparency: loan books, repayments and defaults can be visible onchain in near real time, which is more than most private credit funds disclose to their investors.

Gold: the oldest store of value, newly divisible

Tokenised commodities are almost all gold. On 14 October 2026 rwa.xyz listed Tether Gold at about $3.0 billion and Paxos Gold at about $1.8 billion, with distributed commodity tokens totalling about $5.2 billion. A shop assistant in Kuwait who wants to hold a few grams of gold, rather than a whole coin from the souk, can now do so in a wallet and sell at any hour. The trade-off is trust in the custodian holding the bars.

Tokenisation does not make an asset safer. It makes ownership faster to move and easier to check.

Why institutions bother

The case is mostly about time and collateral. A traditional fund share settles a day or more after the trade and can only move during market hours. A tokenised share can settle in seconds on a Sunday. For a trading firm that needs to post margin at 3 a.m., or a treasurer who wants idle cash earning interest until the minute it is needed, that difference is worth real money. It also cuts the reconciliation work that happens when several firms keep separate records of the same asset.

Wall Street's plumbing moves onchain

The most important development may be the least flashy. In December 2025 the SEC issued a no-action letter letting the Depository Trust Company, part of DTCC, tokenise assets it already holds in custody, starting with Russell 1000 shares, major index ETFs and US Treasuries, on approved blockchains. DTC planned to begin the rollout in the second half of 2026, under an authorisation running three years, according to The Block. DTCC is also a founding validator of Circle's Arc network, and the two plan to tokenise DTC-held assets there from the second half of 2027.

When the institution that settles most US securities trades starts issuing tokens, the question shifts from whether tokenisation happens to how fast.

Forecasts, and a reality check

Predictions vary wildly. Boston Consulting Group once projected $16 trillion of tokenised assets by 2030. McKinsey's more cautious estimate, reported by Ledger Insights, put the figure at under $2 trillion in its base case, within a range of $1 trillion to $4 trillion, excluding stablecoins.

Our view is that the lower forecasts look closer to the trend. Reaching even $1 trillion of freely transferable tokenised assets by 2030 from about $39 billion today would mean the market more than doubling every year. That is possible if DTCC-style tokenisation of mainstream securities takes off, but it is not where the market is today. The more realistic near-term story is that tokenised funds become standard collateral for exchanges, lenders and payment firms, a role covered in our stablecoin market report.

Why it matters beyond Wall Street

For ordinary people, the eventual benefit is access. A teacher in Montreal, a market trader in Kampala or a family in Jakarta could one day hold a fraction of a Treasury fund or a gram of gold as easily as they hold a stablecoin, with the same instant settlement. Most products are still restricted to institutions and qualified investors, and that will change only as regulators get comfortable. But the rails are being laid by the firms that run today's markets, which is the strongest signal yet that they intend to use them. On the payments side of that convergence, see stablecoins vs CBDCs vs tokenised deposits.

Market figures are from rwa.xyz as of 14 October 2026 unless stated otherwise. This article is not investment advice.

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