Reviewing 14 Years of RWA: From the Colored Coins Concept to a Trillion-Dollar Sector
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
In March 2012, Israeli developer Yoni Assia proposed the concept of colored coins: marking specific Bitcoins to enable them to represent real-world assets such as stocks, bonds, and property titles.
Regrettably, this concept never moved beyond the whitepaper stage. However, it raised a proposition that many have continued to explore over the subsequent fourteen years: how to enable illiquid physical assets to circulate as freely as cash.
Fourteen years later, excluding stablecoins, the scale of freely tradable tokenized assets reached $38.29 billion, with committed capital totaling $369.44 billion and a total of 1.79 million holders.
This article systematically sorts through the complete stages of tokenization development to date, analyzing why this path has been so long.
What is Asset Tokenization
Tokenized assets are claims on real-world assets, where the underlying标的 can be Treasury bills, gold bars, credit, hotel equity, etc., carried in the form of on-chain tokens.
Tokens themselves have no independent value. Off-chain, real assets are held by custodians, fund managers, or trust entities, which recognize the tokens as valid certificates for withdrawing the underlying assets. The logic is consistent with the relationship between stock certificates, bearer bonds, and their corresponding underlying assets.
The incremental value brought by blockchain is limited but tangible: it records ownership claims, allowing ownership to be transferred 24/7 in seconds without intermediary brokers matching trades. Stripping away the technical shell, this is an old financial idea; the true innovations are transaction speed, asset participants, and the way assets are used.
Early Builders and First-Generation Dilemmas
Long before the industry believed tokenization could be implemented at scale, a few pioneers had to prove feasibility first. In 2017, Lucas Vogelsang and Martin Quensel founded Centrifuge. For the first four years, the team focused on the Tinlake system, providing financing services for real-world accounts receivable and physical assets based on tranched revolving liquidity pools.
In mid-2021, Centrifuge launched the first RWA liquidity pool connected to MakerDAO (now Sky ecosystem), minting the first batch of DAI backed by real-world assets, and the solution was successfully implemented.
The same model also appeared in the real estate sector. In October 2018, real estate operation enterprise Elevated Returns completed an $18 million financing round, tokenizing 18.9% equity of the Aspen Ridge Hotel valued at $224 million, issuing $1 face value tokens to accredited investors through Templum Markets. This was also the first large-scale commercial real estate tokenization transaction on the blockchain.
A few months later, 31.6% equity of an Andy Warhol painting valued at $5.6 million was tokenized and auctioned in the same manner.
Both transactions were issued as planned, but subsequently stalled. After token minting, the market lacked counterparties, and liquidity was out of the question.
In September 2019, Paxos launched PAXG, the first gold token approved by New York financial regulators. In the same year, Tether launched XAUT, backed by Swiss vault reserves, competing with Paxos's gold product stored in London Brinks vaults. Neither product attracted large-scale institutional allocation at the time. Seven years later, both are still operating normally, with market caps reaching $1.9 billion and $2.7 billion respectively. This also proves that long before the boom in tokenized Treasury bonds, the commodity tokenization model was already viable.
Improvement of regulatory rules lagged far behind innovation. In 2017, the U.S. SEC released the "DAO Report", applying the Howey Test to token offerings for the first time: whether a digital token is a security depends on the offering method, not the token name.
This conclusion spawned the Security Token Offering (STO) track, while establishing entry barriers limited to accredited investors. Over the next four years, issuers continued to launch various STO products, but legal restrictions kept the vast majority of potential traders out. Thin order depth, mandatory lock-up periods, vague custody regulations, and other issues caused this wave to essentially end in 2021. In the same year, prediction market Augur peaked at only 265 active users, subsequently shrinking to 37.
Long-standing Challenges Facing the Industry
Various assets continue to be tokenized, but the vast majority of tokens remain static long-term with no trading. According to Forbes data, currently 88% of RWA market value is concentrated in 62 asset targets; only 5 products — Figure Housing Credit Fund, Circle's USYC, Tether Gold, BlackRock BUIDL, and Justokenglobal's JMWH Fund — account for nearly half of the total market size.
The vast majority of remaining tokens are forgotten by the market after minting. Even within the head assets with concentration as high as 88%, less than 10% of tokenized value is truly revitalized, used as DeFi collateral or participating in lending cycles.
The root of the problem is not lack of demand. As early as before 2024, capital wanted to allocate tokenized Treasury bonds and gold. The real obstacle is that unless there are trusted licensed institutions undertaking custody, asset transfer, and compliance processes, no institution is willing to endorse such assets. Before BlackRock entered, no credible entity validated this business model at a considerable scale.
How Tokenization Achieved a Breakthrough
What the tokenization industry lacks is not better products, but a giant that other institutions generally trust and are willing to publicly endorse for this track.
In March 2024, BlackRock provided this answer, launching the BUIDL tokenized fund, with compliant platform Securitize responsible for tokenization and operational management. Securitize was founded by Carlos Domingo and Jamie Finn in 2017.
Carlos Domingo previously operated the early security token fund SPiCE VC, which was also an important reason BlackRock chose to cooperate with Securitize.
Now BUIDL is issued across 10 public chains, with a size of $2.8 billion, custodied by BNY Mellon, audited by PwC, and a 7-day yield of 3.42%. BlackRock's entry made major asset management institution boards start to take the tokenization track seriously — an effect the four-year STO wave failed to achieve.
Additional Background: Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund launched on Stellar as early as April 2021, the first U.S. registered public fund to adopt a public chain as its official bookkeeping system, three years earlier than BUIDL. Currently, the fund operates on multiple chains: the EVM version iBENJI deployed on BNB Chain and Ethereum has a size of $1.72 billion, and the native Stellar token size is $712.5 million.
Credit and Yield Infrastructure
After the top-layer asset packaging scheme took shape, the industry middle layer needed a trading market matching lenders and borrowers. In 2019, Sid Powell and Joe Flanagan launched Maple Finance, which suffered a heavy blow during its development.
In December 2022, borrower Orthogonal Trading concealed its risk exposure in the FTX collapse, resulting in a $36 million loan default. Within a week, the platform's active loan size shrank by about 30%. Powell admitted at the time he was "shocked and disappointed", and rebuilt platform risk control based on this crisis: broadening borrower access scope, no longer relying solely on agents unilaterally declaring risk exposure.
To date, Maple has cumulatively issued loans exceeding $20 billion, and its syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT products have a combined size of $1.9 billion, making it the leading tokenized private credit platform by size.
Two years later, Goldman Sachs Digital Assets veteran Nathan Allman founded Ondo. The core product OUSG is the first peer-to-peer transferable tokenized Treasury token; USDY is the first yield-bearing stablecoin with no entry threshold. Currently, USDY size is $2.145 billion, and OUSG size is $449 million. Ondo is also the largest on-chain distribution channel for BUIDL. Regrettably, founder Nathan Allman passed away unexpectedly in May 2026.
Oracles and Data Infrastructure
On-chain smart contracts reliably reading off-chain asset prices and fund Net Asset Value (NAV) is the foundation for all application implementation. Currently, the track is mainly divided among four major networks:
RedStone: In March 2025, Securitize selected RedStone as its core oracle partner. Now RedStone provides daily NAV data streams for all Securitize tokenized funds including BUIDL, Apollo ACRED, VanEck VBILL, Hamilton Lane SCOPE, etc. Before access, tokens issued by Securitize lacked real-time quotes — although fund shares existed on-chain, lending protocols could not obtain real-time valuations. Relying on RedStone price feeds, ACRED was able to generate yield on Morpho, and VBILL could serve as collateral on Euler. Currently, RedStone secures on-chain assets spanning 110 blockchains with a size of about $6 billion, mostly serving institutional fund pricing rather than native crypto tokens.
Pyth Network: Targeting the other end of the market, focusing on speed first, weakening complex NAV calculations. It adopts a pull model, adapted for high-frequency trading targets: stocks, forex, commodities, supporting over 750 U.S. stock trading pairs and multi-tenor Treasury rate data. Ondo selected Pyth to provide quotes for USDY yield tokens, with service covering 65 blockchains. Even脱离 the Securitize tech stack, Ondo's own Treasury products have independent credible price data sources.
DIA: Focuses on verifiability and full-link transparency from data source to contract. The xReal suite covers over 100 RWA price indicators, including stocks, ETFs, forex, bond yields. Both Stellar and Ripple selected DIA when advancing RWA cooperation. Institutions tend to prefer complete audit data source logic rather than relying solely on brand endorsement during compliance processes, which DIA matches precisely.
Chainlink: Undertakes business not touched by the other three — data transmission and asset interoperability across mutually untrusted blockchains, not directly responsible for fund pricing. Its CCIP channel distributes DTCC smart NAV data, supporting the pilot conducted by SWIFT and UBS in Singapore's "Project Guardian". The project launched in May 2022 and completed UBS's first real tokenized fund pilot in October 2023. CCIP cross-chain transfer size last quarter was $4.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 353%, securing total asset value of $110 billion across the network. Only on Mantle chain, the token volume circulated via CCIP this year exceeded $2.5 billion. DTCC is embedding Chainlink infrastructure into its own collateral application chain, targeting launch in Q4 2026.
Distribution Channel Construction
Asset packaging/issuance and market distribution are two completely independent subjects.
Mantle network originated from BitDAO. BitDAO received strong support from exchange Bybit, and at its peak, its treasury volume rivaled the Ethereum Foundation. In 2023, BitDAO merged into Mantle, fully inheriting treasury assets, holding nearly $300 million in stablecoins and 270,000 ETH at the time; now the treasury size has expanded to $2.4 billion. Capital that most startup teams need years of financing to obtain, Mantle possessed from the start. Currently, Mantle has listed over 155 types of tokenized stocks, and DeFi liquidity size has exceeded $1 billion. On August 6, relying on CCIP to build channels, Mantle expanded RWA infrastructure to Solana, outputting its ecosystem to a non-native public chain for the first time.
Coinbase and Binance focus on collateral and asset aggregation tracks. BUIDL has landed on BNB Chain and can be used directly as collateral on Binance.
MEXC is one of the most comprehensively laid-out trading platforms, listing over 105 pairs of Ondo tokenized stocks, while supporting PAXG, XAUT, and mainstream RWA infrastructure tokens. In August alone, 5 new targets were added, covering AI infrastructure and rare earth sectors. In Q1 2026, the platform accounted for 27% of global tokenized gold trading volume, ranking second globally. This month MEXC upgraded RealStocks products, relying on broker cooperation to cover over 7,000 U.S. stocks and ETFs; new functions allow token holders to fully correspond to real shareholder rights.
The fastest-growing category is not limited to spot market listings; Hyperliquid and Binance RWA perpetual contracts had a weekly trading volume of $61.7 billion at the end of July, equivalent to 99.2% of the Bitcoin perpetual contract trading volume of the two platforms during the same period, with tokenized stocks accounting for 58% of this. On Hyperliquid, RWA perpetual trading volume has already exceeded the sum of all other categories on the platform.
Regulation Gradually Catches Up with Innovation Pace
Four main lines advance simultaneously at the regulatory level:
- "GENIUS Act": The first federal stablecoin bill in U.S. history, signed into effect on July 18, 2025.
- "CLARITY Act": Aims to establish market rules for the rest of the crypto industry. The bill passed the House of Representatives one day earlier, and passed the Senate Banking Committee with a 15-9 vote in May 2026. Subsequently stalled: Democrats requested adding digital asset conflict of interest clauses for public officials, while Republicans hoped to remove relevant content to advance legislation. The Senate entered recess on August 8 without a final vote. However, Senate Leader Thune submitted a motion to end debate before recess, scheduled to start procedural voting on September 15 (the day after senators reconvene). This vote does not equal bill passage, only represents opening floor debate. Senate staff revealed externally that the conflict of interest clause controversy remains unresolved. If shelved again in September, the midterm election schedule will significantly compress the remaining legislative window this year.
- The U.S. SEC chose an independent path. In March 2026, the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission jointly released a token classification framework, dividing digital assets into five categories, with only "Digital Securities" fully under SEC jurisdiction. SEC Chair Paul Atkins stated at the Washington Economic Club in April: regulators are "about to release" innovation exemption rules, establishing a regulatory sandbox. Enterprises can trade tokenized securities on-chain within 12 to 36 months without completing the full registration process. Bloomberg reported in mid-May that policies were about to land; on May 22 the SEC paused advancement, listening to stock exchange opposition opinions regarding investor protection. As of mid-June latest news, this exemption scheme has still not been officially released.
- Nasdaq, NYSE, and DTCC chose not to wait any longer. In March 2026, the SEC approved Nasdaq rule revisions, allowing Russell 1000 components and index ETFs to conduct tokenized trading relying on existing traditional trading infrastructure; NYSE similar scheme approved in April. DTCC, with custodied asset size of about $114 trillion, announced on May 4 that it will conduct production-level pilots in July 2026, with over 50 institutions including BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs participating, covering Russell 1000 components, mainstream index ETFs, and U.S. Treasury bonds, planning full rollout in October. This system fully retains all traditional rights such as shareholder voting and dividends, maintaining the core securities registration system unchanged, with tokens merely serving as packaging carriers for settlement records.
The exemption scheme shelved by the SEC would have opened a second more relaxed channel: issuing tokens without underlying listed company authorization, where investors only enjoy economic benefits without shareholder rights. Whether and when this second channel can land remains unknown. But the DTCC pilot alone is sufficient to prove: compliant tokenized trading of U.S. mainstream stocks will definitely arrive.
Has the Liquidity Problem Been Solved?
Reviewing the current status against the industry pain points raised earlier: the liquidity fragmentation problem has been partially alleviated. Liquidity in Treasury bonds and private credit tracks is relatively sufficient, with sizes reaching $16.2 billion and $7.3 billion respectively, corresponding to 87 and 2,543 underlying targets.
Apart from this, liquidity in other tracks remains weak (most category sizes are under $1 billion). The custody trust problem for institutions at the BlackRock and Franklin Templeton level has been solved, but remains unsolved for small and medium issuers. Approximately 97% of tokenized assets still set entry thresholds, ordinary retail investors cannot participate, and the root of the barrier can be traced back to the 2017 SEC Howey Test determination standard.
The above is a relatively optimistic perspective. In July 2026, BeInCrypto Intelligence released a report relying on over 7,000 tokenized product data from RWA.xyz, revealing a harsher reality: among tokenized assets with market cap over $100,000, 56% (about $32.9 billion) had zero on-chain transfer records in a single week. Asset on-chain and asset circulating on-chain are two completely different things. Currently, the industry has only completed the first step.
Some phenomena belong to the original intention of product design: buying tokenized Treasury bonds to obtain yield does not require daily trading like speculative bonds. But the objective status quo cannot be avoided, the market shows obvious head concentration. Five products occupy nearly half the market cap, while the remaining over 6,000 targets are mostly silent.
Various institutions have huge differences in market size predictions, but consensus exists on the growth direction. McKinsey baseline scenario predicts: tokenized asset size will reach $2-4 trillion in the 2030s; Ark Invest predicts $11 trillion; Boston Consulting Group jointly with Invesco predicts $9.4 trillion in 2030, rising to $18.9 trillion in 2033; Standard Chartered predicts breaking $30 trillion in 2034.
The difference in values is essentially not disagreement on whether growth will occur; everyone predicts market size will expand 100 times compared to current. The divergence comes from statistical scope: whether stablecoins are included, whether bank deposits are included, how the boundary of tokenization definition is drawn.
Institutions acknowledge growth expectations while remaining cautious. Coinbase and EY surveyed 351 institutional decision-makers in January 2026: 73% plan to increase digital asset allocation within the year, 65% list regulatory clarity as the primary driving factor. At the same time, 66% of respondents also list regulatory uncertainty as the biggest risk. The core condition driving capital entry remains precisely unresolved.
Another EY survey shows institutions are unwilling to wait for regulation to land: 83% of institutional investors plan to allocate tokenized bonds by end of 2026, compared to only 33% two years ago.
The change is already reflected in the underlying infrastructure, not just staying on survey questionnaires. In February 2026, BUIDL accessed UniswapX to enable direct trading; in March connected to Chronicle verification system, allowing anyone to verify BlackRock underlying Treasury holdings in real-time relying on BNY Mellon custody records. Sky ecosystem Spark liquidity layer automatically allocates $1.5 billion capital, switching between BUIDL, Anemoy, Superstateinc, investing in real-time into the highest yield targets — this work previously relied on capital traders manual operation.
DWF Labs founder Andrei Grachev believes tokenized stocks have already reshaped trader behavior. Crypto investors can switch to allocating stock assets without leaving existing trading platforms, and predicts on-chain stocks and commodities scale will see significant growth this year. Artem Tolkachev of Falcon Finance straightforwardly stated this mechanism: composability and redemption mechanisms are what can truly connect physical assets and crypto liquidity.
The industry is differentiating into two development paths: one party prioritizes ensuring ownership compliance, building access channels, with tokens running entirely within compliance boundaries; the other party prioritizes pursuing composability, encapsulating compliant assets like BUIDL, enabling them to circulate freely within permissionless DeFi ecosystems.
This can be seen as a contest between RWA 1.0 and RWA 2.0, but now it is no longer theoretical discussion, but two competing product roadmaps. Earlier this year Circle's USYC size surpassed BlackRock BUIDL, becoming the largest tokenized Treasury fund by volume, meaning the latter is temporarily superior at the distribution level, while brand influence is another matter.
RWA 1.0: Simply mapping real-world assets, only supporting buy, hold, redeem; Aspen Ridge Hotel tokens, Maple early lending liquidity pools all belong to this paradigm. RWA 2.0: Enabling real-world assets to continuously generate utility. In Q2 2026, the size of tokenized real-world assets deposited into various DeFi platforms reached $7.4 billion, a year-on-year increase of over twofold, with yield-bearing stablecoins and tokenized Treasury bonds accounting for the highest proportion. Maple's syrupUSDT has already accessed Aave on Mantle and is officially running; real capital circular infrastructure has landed.
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