For most of 2022 and 2023, the phrase “real-world asset tokenization” sat in U.S. financial conversation alongside flying cars and quantum trading: technically interesting, practically unproven. By the start of 2026 the picture has shifted, quietly and fundamentally. According to RWA.xyz, total tokenized real-world asset value held in U.S.-accessible products was approximately $21 billion at the start of 2026 per RWA.xyz, up from $1.7 billion two years earlier. The category did not arrive with a launch event. It arrived through a string of small institutional deals, each adding a few hundred million in tokenised assets to chains that were already there. The story of tokenization of assets America is now a story about settlement infrastructure, not speculation.
What is actually being tokenised
The composition of the $24.5 billion is the most useful data point. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries account for $9.8 billion, dominated by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund ($2.4 billion), Franklin Templeton’s on-chain U.S. Government Money Fund ($720 million), and Ondo Finance’s USDY product ($1.2 billion). Tokenised private credit makes up another $7.6 billion, much of it issued through Maple, Centrifuge, and Goldfinch on Ethereum and on permissioned chains. Tokenised money market fund shares represent $4.3 billion. Real estate, fine art, and other illiquid asset classes together total about $2.8 billion, a much smaller share than the 2021 narrative anticipated.
The pattern is consistent: the tokenised assets that have grown fastest are the ones with the cleanest legal wrapper and the most familiar institutional users. Fixed income leads. Real estate trails. Collectibles barely move. The reason is that the friction in tokenization is rarely the technology; it is the legal and operational scaffolding around the wrapped asset. Treasuries, with a single issuer, a deep secondary market, and a settled regulatory regime, were always going to be the easiest thing to put on chain. They have been.
Tokenization of assets in America: composition by category, January 2026. Sources: RWA.xyz, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Maple.Why institutions actually use it
The reason a hedge fund or a pension manager touches tokenised products is not for the technology itself. The technology is plumbing. The reason is operational: tokenised products settle faster, post collateral more flexibly, and reduce the working capital tied up in pending trades. JPMorgan reported in late 2025 that its Kinexys network (formerly Onyx) was processing about $2.1 billion in daily intraday repo through tokenised collateral, with average settlement under three minutes. The same trade settled through traditional rails would have moved on a T+1 basis. Three minutes versus a day is, in capital terms, a very large number on a very large book.
State Street and BNY Mellon both run pilots that use tokenised collateral on Canton Network and Provenance, respectively. Goldman Sachs is the most active U.S. bank in tokenised bond issuance, with three sovereign issuances on its GS DAP platform in the second half of 2025. Citi’s Token Services, launched in 2024, processed roughly $5 billion in cross-border treasury management transactions during 2025. None of these are public-facing. None advertise themselves as DeFi. They are, in their internal language, “tokenisation infrastructure.” The distinction matters because it tells you who the audience is: treasury teams trying to free working capital.
The regulatory ground beneath all of this
Tokenization could not have grown to $24.5 billion without two pieces of U.S. regulation that reached their final form in 2025. The first was the GENIUS Act, which gave dollar-pegged stablecoins a defined federal framework: full reserve backing, monthly attestations, and a path for both bank and non-bank issuers to operate at federal scale. Stablecoin clarity unlocked tokenised products that needed an on-chain settlement currency. The second was an SEC rulemaking finalised in October 2025 that gave registered investment advisers explicit permission to hold tokenised securities on behalf of clients, provided custody met an updated set of standards.
What is still unsettled, importantly, is the cross-border treatment. A tokenised U.S. Treasury held in a wallet operated by a non-U.S. holder still triggers ambiguous tax and reporting consequences. The IRS issued guidance in February 2026 that began to clarify these obligations but stopped short of resolving them. The expected next step, according to two of the law firms we spoke to during our research, is a joint OECD framework that will land sometime in 2026 or early 2027.
The other open question is the treatment of programmable-money features (automatic coupon payments, automatic redemption triggers, embedded compliance logic) under the existing securities laws. The SEC has not signalled how it will treat smart contract-mediated cash flows, and that ambiguity is the main reason large insurers and pension funds have stayed in pilots rather than moving live.
One smaller signal worth flagging: the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency confirmed in December 2025 that nationally chartered banks may use distributed ledger infrastructure for permitted banking activities without a separate filing, treating the network as plumbing rather than a new line of business. That confirmation is the operational green light most regional banks were waiting for.
Where the money is moving fastest
Three pockets of growth are running ahead of the rest. Tokenised private credit grew 4.1x in 2025, partly because the asset class itself is in demand and partly because tokenisation solves a structural problem: the high settlement and reporting cost of fund administration on private credit vehicles. On-chain administration cuts that cost meaningfully and makes smaller fund vehicles economically viable. The second pocket is tokenised money market funds, which BlackRock and Franklin Templeton have been quietly distributing to their largest institutional clients as a cash-management product. The selling point is the ability to move balances between funds in minutes rather than waiting for end-of-day NAV calculation. The third is on-chain repo, where the case is purely operational: faster settlement, cheaper collateral movement, and fewer reconciliation breaks.
What has not grown fast is retail-facing tokenisation. Tokenised real estate, the consumer-product variant of the category, has stayed roughly flat at $1.4 billion through 2025. The constraints there are securities-law fractionalisation rules and the high cost of legally compliant retail distribution. Several startups are working through those, but the timeline to retail volume is still measured in years, not months.
The institutional posture has also changed in a way the headline numbers do not capture. Two years ago the typical large U.S. bank had a tokenization team of three or four people inside an innovation group, with a remit to build pilots. By the start of 2026, that has consolidated into a working line in operations: tokenised collateral runs alongside repo and securities lending in the daily reporting pack, and the platform itself has moved from innovation cost centre to revenue contributor. State Street’s annual letter for 2025 mentioned tokenised products specifically as a line item in fee income for the first time. JPMorgan’s earnings call in January 2026 referenced Onyx volumes twice. The category has crossed from sandbox to balance sheet, even if the dollar amounts remain a fraction of total firm activity.
What 2026 is likely to bring for tokenization of assets America
Two questions will shape the year. First, whether tokenised treasuries cross $20 billion individually, which would put the on-chain treasury market on equal footing with several mid-sized money market funds. The trajectory suggests that crossing happens by Q3 2026 if BlackRock and Franklin Templeton continue distributing to institutional clients at the current pace. Second, whether at least one major U.S. exchange (NYSE, Nasdaq) launches a tokenised secondary trading venue. NYSE’s parent, ICE, has announced one for late 2026; Nasdaq is reportedly in advanced planning. The first of these to go live will set the pricing and operational baseline for the rest of the industry.
What will probably not happen in 2026 is a step-change in retail tokenisation. The legal and operational unlocks for that scenario are still in motion. The institutional layer, by contrast, is moving fast enough that the line between “tokenised” and “regular” finance will blur further. By the end of 2026 the question for most U.S. asset managers will not be whether to use tokenised settlement; it will be which network to settle on. That is a different conversation than the one happening eighteen months ago, and it is the conversation that the next twelve months are likely to define.
