The $10 Trillion Push: Why Traditional Finance Is Rushing to Tokenize Everything
At a blockchain conference in Toronto earlier this month, four executives walked onto separate stages and pitched essentially the same idea: take something that’s hard to sell, wrap it in a blockchain token, and let people buy fractions of it. One was tokenizing gold still buried in the ground. Another was turning life insurance policies into collateral. A third was fractionalizing a multi-billion-dollar office campus. The fourth was doing something similar with commercial real estate.
The pitches sounded like the future. The numbers told a different story. Tokenized real-world assets on public blockchains total roughly $31 billion, according to data tracker RWA.xyz. That’s a rounding error next to the markets these companies described. But BlackRock CEO Larry Fink set the tone for the industry back in January 2024 when he said: “The next step going forward will be tokenization of financial assets, and that means every stock, every bond… will be on one general ledger.”
Two and a half years later, the tokenization of everything is still arriving. But the infrastructure is finally catching up to the ambition.
What tokenization actually means
Tokenization is the process of representing ownership of a real-world asset as a digital token on a blockchain. Instead of owning a share of a building through a traditional deed and brokerage account, you own a token that represents that share. The token lives on a blockchain, which means it can be transferred, traded, and programmed with smart contracts that automate things like dividend payments, voting rights, and compliance checks.
The appeal is straightforward. Traditional assets like real estate, fine art, and private equity are illiquid. You can’t sell a fraction of a painting easily, and selling a fraction of a building requires lawyers, brokers, and weeks of paperwork. Tokenization removes most of that friction. A token can be bought and sold in seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from anywhere in the world.
The reality is more complicated. Liquidity depends on having buyers and sellers, and the tokenized asset market is still thin. Regulatory frameworks vary wildly by jurisdiction. Custody solutions are improving but not yet seamless. And the fundamental question of whether a token on a blockchain actually represents legal ownership of the underlying asset remains unsettled in many cases.
The $31 billion question
The current market for tokenized RWAs sits at approximately $31 billion on public blockchains. That number includes tokenized government bonds, corporate debt, real estate, commodities, and a handful of other asset classes. It’s grown steadily over the past two years, but it’s nowhere near the scale that would justify the “tokenize everything” narrative.
The gap between the current market and the projected market is where the opportunity lives — and where the risk lives. Companies like nGRND are tokenizing gold that’s still in the ground, offering investors discounted access to gold without the costs of physical extraction and storage. The concept is creative, but it introduces layers of complexity: who verifies the gold exists? What happens if the mining operation fails? How do you price a token backed by an asset that hasn’t been extracted yet?
Infineo is taking a different approach, tokenizing whole life insurance policies to use as collateral for a stablecoin. The idea is that life insurance policies have predictable cash values that can be modeled and tokenized. But insurance policies are regulated products with complex surrender values, and converting them into blockchain collateral requires navigating insurance law, securities law, and money transmission regulations simultaneously.
These ventures are running well ahead of the current market. The tokenization of everything has been arriving “any day now” for several years, and the actual adoption curve has been slower than the hype suggested. But the direction is clear: the infrastructure for tokenizing assets is improving, and the regulatory landscape is slowly but surely becoming more favorable.
What’s driving the push now
Several factors are converging to accelerate RWA tokenization in 2026.
Institutional adoption is finally happening. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, launched in 2024, has grown to hold billions in tokenized Treasury bills. Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, and other major asset managers have launched or expanded tokenized product lines. When the world’s largest asset manager puts its weight behind tokenization, it sends a signal to the rest of the industry. The fund’s success has demonstrated that institutional investors are willing to hold tokenized assets when the infrastructure supports it — and that willingness is what unlocks the next wave of adoption.
Regulatory clarity is improving. The EU’s MiCA framework, which took full effect in 2025, provides a regulatory pathway for tokenized assets in the world’s second-largest economy. In the US, the SEC has been issuing more guidance on how existing securities laws apply to tokenized products. Singapore, Hong Kong, and the UAE have all launched regulatory sandboxes for tokenized asset experiments. Regulatory clarity doesn’t guarantee adoption, but it removes the biggest barrier to institutional participation: the fear that the rules will change under them.
Yield-bearing RWAs are gaining popularity. Investors are increasingly interested in tokenized assets that generate predictable returns. Tokenized Treasury bills, which pay yields backed by US government debt, have become one of the most successful RWA categories. The combination of blockchain efficiency and government-backed yield is a compelling value proposition. Beyond government bonds, platforms are beginning to offer tokenized corporate debt, real estate investment trusts, and even revenue-sharing tokens tied to specific businesses.
AI integration is improving platform efficiency. Tokenization platforms are incorporating AI for automated compliance checks, risk assessment, and price discovery. Machine learning models can evaluate the creditworthiness of tokenized debt instruments faster than traditional analysts. Natural language processing can parse regulatory documents across multiple jurisdictions to determine compliance requirements. These features reduce the operational overhead that has historically made tokenized assets expensive to manage.
Cross-chain interoperability is becoming essential. Blockchain fragmentation has been one of the biggest obstacles to tokenized asset adoption. An asset tokenized on Ethereum isn’t easily traded on a Solana-based exchange. But new cross-chain protocols and bridge infrastructure are making it possible to move tokenized assets between blockchains with less friction. When interoperability becomes seamless, the liquidity pools for tokenized assets will deepen significantly.
The challenges that remain
Tokenization faces real obstacles that aren’t going away with better technology.
Legal uncertainty. In most jurisdictions, the legal status of a tokenized asset is still evolving. Does owning a token mean you own the underlying asset? What happens in bankruptcy? How are tokenized assets taxed? These questions have different answers in different countries, and the lack of universal standards creates friction for cross-border transactions.
Liquidity fragmentation. The same asset might be tokenized on multiple blockchains, each with its own ecosystem of exchanges, wallets, and users. Cross-chain interoperability is improving but remains a technical challenge. An asset tokenized on Ethereum isn’t easily traded on a Solana-based platform without bridge infrastructure that adds complexity and risk. The result is that tokenized assets often trade at discounts to their traditional counterparts because the buyer pool is smaller and more fragmented.
Custody and security. Holding tokenized assets requires secure custody solutions. The crypto industry’s track record with custody — from exchange hacks to wallet failures — doesn’t inspire confidence among traditional investors. Institutional-grade custody is improving, but it’s not yet as seamless as traditional brokerage accounts. The custody problem is particularly acute for tokenized real estate and other illiquid assets, where the token represents legal ownership that must be verifiable and recoverable.
Valuation complexity. How do you price a token backed by gold still in the ground? Or a fraction of a commercial building? Traditional valuation methods rely on appraisals, market comparables, and financial models. Tokenization adds layers of abstraction that can make valuation more uncertain, not less.
What comes next
The tokenization of everything won’t happen overnight, and it won’t look like the hype suggests either. The most likely path forward is incremental: government bonds and money market funds first, then corporate debt, then real estate, then more exotic assets like fine art and intellectual property.
The $31 billion market today will probably grow to $100 billion or more within the next two years, driven by institutional adoption and improving regulatory clarity. But the $10 trillion vision — every stock, every bond, every asset on a single ledger — is likely a decade or more away, if it happens at all.
For investors and businesses, the practical approach is to watch the infrastructure layer closely. The companies building the plumbing — custody providers, compliance platforms, cross-chain bridges — are more likely to capture value in the near term than the ventures tokenizing individual assets. The gold-in-the-ground pitches are attention-grabbing, but the real opportunity is in making tokenized assets work at scale.
BlackRock’s Larry Fink was right that tokenization will eventually touch every financial asset. He was probably wrong about the timeline. The tokenization of everything is coming, but it’s coming slowly, one asset class at a time, and the companies that succeed will be the ones that solve the boring infrastructure problems rather than pitching the exciting use cases.
The Toronto conference pitches — gold in the ground, life insurance as collateral, billion-dollar office campuses — represent the aspirational end of the spectrum. They’re creative, they’re ambitious, and they illustrate the breadth of what tokenization could theoretically encompass. But the market for tokenized assets isn’t built on aspirations. It’s built on regulatory approvals, custody infrastructure, and institutional trust. Those things take time.
What’s changed in 2026 compared to 2024 is that the conversation has shifted from “will tokenization happen?” to “how fast will it happen?” The answer depends on which asset class you’re looking at. Government bonds are already there — tokenized Treasury bills are a functioning market with billions in assets. Corporate debt is next, with several platforms launching tokenized bond products. Real estate is further behind, constrained by property law and the complexity of fractional ownership. And exotic assets like gold-in-the-ground remain experimental.
For anyone building in this space, the message is clear: the infrastructure layer matters more than the application layer right now. Custody, compliance, interoperability, and regulatory clarity are the bottlenecks. Solve those, and the tokenization of everything becomes possible. Ignore them, and you’re pitching at conferences while the market waits.