Real World Asset Tokenization: What Is Actually Being Issued in 2026

Real world asset tokenization is the issuance of a claim on an off-chain asset — a Treasury bill, a private loan, a gold bar, a building — as a transferable token on a blockchain, where the token records who holds the claim and a legal wrapper holds the asset. The token is a format for issuing a right. It is not a new asset class.

That distinction decides everything that follows, including which parts of this market are real. On 6 August 2026, rwa.xyz put the value of tokenized assets excluding stablecoins at $37.89 billion, up 3.32% over thirty days across 1,202 tracked assets. Tokenized real estate was $202.77 million of that — roughly half of one percent — and it was the only major class smaller than it had been a month earlier.

This page is written for the party doing the issuing rather than the party buying. It covers what is actually being issued, what each class requires structurally, and where the work sits.

Read the Numbers Before You Read the Forecasts

One thing to settle first, because it is the most common error in writing about this market: rwa.xyz publishes two totals per category, and they diverge sharply.

• Distributed value is what has actually been issued on-chain.

• Represented value is the underlying asset value the issuance points at.

Private credit reads $7.29 billion distributed against $36.67 billion represented. Quoting either figure without saying which one it is produces a five-fold difference in the same sentence. Where this page gives one number, it is the distributed figure.

The second thing to settle is stablecoins. Including them, rwa.xyz shows $365.15 billion represented; excluding them, $37.89 billion. Most headline figures quietly include stablecoins, which is why the same market is described as both a $300-billion and a $40-billion story in the same week.

Published institutional forecasts for the end of the decade disagree by an order of magnitude, mostly because they are counting different things — Citi’s June 2026 note puts tokenized securities at $5.5 trillion by 2030, while others reach far higher by including deposits and stablecoins. We compare those projections source by source separately; this page stays on what exists.

What Is Being Issued Today, by Size

The order below is by distributed value on 6 August 2026. It is not the order most coverage of this market implies.

US Treasuries — $16.12 billion

The largest class by a wide margin: 87 funds and 62,975 holders, with a seven-day yield around 3.43%. Tokenized Treasuries work because the underlying instrument is already dematerialised, already has a daily price, and already settles through regulated intermediaries. Tokenization changes the distribution and settlement layer, not the asset.

What it requires of an issuer: a fund wrapper and a transfer agent, plus a regulated custodian for the underlying. The structuring problem is fund formation, not blockchain.

Private Credit — $7.29 billion

2,543 products and 191,475 holders. This is the class with the widest gap between distributed and represented value, and the one where methodology matters most when comparing sources.

What it requires of an issuer: loan documentation that survives transfer, and a servicer. Private credit is where post-issuance operations bite hardest — payments arrive on a schedule and have to reach holders who traded during the period.

Commodities — $4.83 billion

92 assets and 256,310 holders, dominated by gold. Tether Gold and Paxos Gold account for most of the class. Each token corresponds to a defined quantity in a named vault.

What it requires of an issuer: custody with audited attestation. The token is only as good as the vault arrangement behind it, which is why this class is concentrated among a handful of issuers rather than fragmented.

Equities — $2.31 billion

3,328 assets and 1.02 million holders — the fastest holder growth of any class, up 124% over thirty days. Holder count here vastly exceeds value, which tells you the average position is small.

What it requires of an issuer: securities law compliance in every market where the token can be received, which in practice means transfer restrictions enforced at the contract level.

Real Estate — $202.77 million

105 products, about 18,700 holders, across 11 countries. Down 0.10% over thirty days — the only major class that shrank.

This deserves a plain statement, because most coverage treats real estate as the flagship RWA class: it is the least built-out of the major classes, at roughly half of one percent of the market. Deloitte projects $4 trillion of tokenized real estate by 2035, which is a forecast about a market that has barely started rather than a description of one that has.

The reason is structural rather than technological. A Treasury bill is fungible, priced daily and already dematerialised. A building is none of those things: it needs a valuation, a holding vehicle, a jurisdiction-specific transfer regime, and an answer for what happens to rent every month. That work is the actual product, and we cover how a property offering is put together separately.

What Makes It Work

Three layers have to hold at once, and they fail independently.

The legal wrapper. A company, fund or trust owns the asset; the token represents a claim against that entity. Choosing the wrapper decides who may invest, how the deal is taxed, and which countries you can sell into. It is chosen first because everything else is downstream of it.

The token standard. Permissionless standards such as ERC-20 do not enforce eligibility. Security-token standards — ERC-1400 and ERC-3643 among them — carry transfer restrictions inside the contract, so a wallet that has not passed onboarding cannot receive units at all. For a regulated offering, this is not a preference; it is what makes the compliance claim enforceable rather than procedural.

Onboarding and record-keeping. Identity checks before purchase, a register that survives transfer, and records a supervisor can ask for later. On-chain, this collapses into the contract rather than sitting beside it in a spreadsheet.

Which regime applies to a given offering depends on the wrapper and on where the investors are. The EU’s MiCA framework, the UAE’s VARA and free-zone regimes, and Singapore’s MAS regime each treat these instruments differently, and whether a particular instrument falls inside one of them or is treated as a financial instrument under existing securities law is fact-specific. Our country-by-country index lists the jurisdictions we work in and links through to each.

What It Takes to Issue

The gap between reading about this market and issuing into it is smaller than it looks, and it is not mainly technical.

The software layer — contract, investor portal, onboarding, reporting — runs in weeks rather than quarters, which is why platform timelines are quoted the way they are. What varies is everything around it: forming the vehicle, getting counsel comfortable in the target jurisdiction, and opening the banking relationship that will hold subscriptions. Those three set the date, and they run in parallel rather than in sequence.

Two costs are consistently underestimated by first-time issuers. The first is the security audit, which cannot be compressed. The second is post-issuance operations — distributions, buybacks, reporting, register maintenance — which is not a launch cost at all but a permanent one that grows with every holder added.

The build-or-buy question follows from that. Assembling the stack in-house means a Solidity team, a separate audit engagement, a KYC vendor integration and a product build for the investor dashboard, before the first offering exists. An overview of our white-label platform sets out what the alternative includes; which components you take and which stay in-house is a scoping question rather than a fixed list. Our contracts are independently audited by Hacken, with full branch coverage and no critical or high-severity findings.

For a step-by-step view of the process itself, from wrapper selection to distribution, see how tokenization works.

Where This Leaves an Issuer

The market is real and concentrated. Nearly two thirds of it is tokenized Treasuries, where the underlying was already digital and the gain is distribution. The classes that require genuine structuring work — private credit and real estate — are earlier, smaller, and harder, and that is precisely where the work has value.

If your asset is a building, the honest framing is that you are early rather than late. The class is $202 million against a $37.89 billion market, and the constraint is structuring capacity rather than investor appetite. That constraint is addressable, and it is what the platform exists to remove.

If you are weighing whether a specific asset suits this at all, our suitability and cost breakdown filters by asset type and explains when the answer is no. And if you want the figures scoped against your own deal rather than in general, request a pricing proposal.

Market data: rwa.xyz, 6 August 2026. Figures are distributed value excluding stablecoins unless stated otherwise.