The real-world asset (RWA) tokenization sector experienced a turning point in 2025. What had long been viewed as a niche experiment at the intersection of FinTech and blockchain technology was increasingly treated by year-end as a core piece of financial market infrastructure. Major financial institutions, asset managers, corporations, and regulators moved beyond pilot initiatives and began scaling deployments. The focus shifted toward settlement efficiency, improved access to liquidity, and greater operational automation.
In this analysis, we review the outcomes of 2025. We examine the drivers behind the sector’s growth, assess key quantitative metrics, highlight the most illustrative use cases, and outline potential development scenarios for the real-world asset tokenization market in the years ahead.
Key Factors Fueling Growing Interest in Tokenization
The surge in interest in tokenization in 2025 stemmed from several interconnected developments that unfolded in parallel and, at a certain point, began reinforcing one another. Over time, tokenization moved beyond its reputation as a technological experiment and was increasingly viewed as a practical tool for improving the efficiency of financial markets.
By definition, real-world asset tokenization involves the issuance of digital tokens that circulate on a distributed ledger and represent ownership rights or claims on an underlying asset. These assets can include both financial instruments and non-financial objects.
The Push to Optimize the Traditional Financial System
One of the key underlying drivers was mounting pressure on traditional financial infrastructure. In an environment of elevated interest rates and higher capital costs, market participants became far more sensitive to operating expenses, settlement speed, and liquidity utilization. Legacy models built around multi-layer clearing, T+2 or T+3 settlement cycles, and complex cross-border capital flows increasingly revealed structural limitations. Against this backdrop, tokenization offers several clear advantages, including:
- Shorter settlement cycles and reduced reliance on intermediary funding
- Lower operational and back-office costs
- Greater transparency in asset ownership and movement
- Streamlined and simplified cross-border operations
The Institutionalization of Blockchain Technology
At the same time, blockchain infrastructure continued to mature. By 2025, the market had largely moved past early experimentation around scalability, reliability, and smart contract security. Stable technological and operational practices had emerged, making distributed ledger technology (DLT) viable for institutional participants. In particular, the following became widely adopted:
- Institutional-grade digital asset custody standards
- Regular audits of smart contracts and supporting infrastructure
- Compliance mechanisms embedded directly into the token lifecycle logic
- Hybrid models combining on-chain and off-chain instruments
Regulatory Shifts Supporting Market Maturation
The evolution of regulatory approaches also played a significant role in accelerating the market. In many jurisdictions, 2025 marked a shift from cautious observation to more practical forms of oversight. Regulators increasingly viewed tokenization as an extension of existing financial markets rather than a parallel system. This shift translated into the launch of regulated pilot regimes, the recognition of distributed ledgers as an acceptable method for recording ownership rights, and clearer classification of tokenized instruments. Even in jurisdictions where regulatory frameworks remained fragmented, overall regulatory uncertainty declined noticeably.
Rising Demand From Market Participants
Finally, sustained demand from issuers and investors provided an additional boost to market development. For issuers, tokenization became a tool for faster time-to-market and more flexible deal structuring. For investors, the main sources of appeal included:
- Access to previously closed or hard-to-reach asset classes
- The ability to fractionalize investments and lower entry thresholds
- Automated income distribution and corporate actions
- Greater transparency in product structure
Taken together, these factors created an environment in which tokenization in 2025 was no longer viewed as an alternative to traditional markets but as a technology that supports their evolution. This shift in perception became one of the key drivers behind the move from isolated experiments to more systematic and large-scale adoption.
Key Metrics, Use Cases, and Market Challenges in 2025
An analysis of key metrics for 2025 shows that the tokenization market has entered a phase of active growth, while its structure remains uneven. Different segments continue to display varying levels of maturity, liquidity, and investor participation.
Key Metrics Defining the RWA Market
First, it’s worth looking at the total volume of assets issued in tokenized form. By the end of 2025, according to RWA.xyz, the total value of real-world assets tokenized on public blockchain networks exceeded $18.5 billion, representing year-over-year growth of roughly 240%. The bulk of this volume came from financial assets, primarily tokenized debt instruments, funds, and private credit products. Non-financial assets, including real estate and infrastructure projects, accounted for a significantly smaller share. This reflects the greater complexity involved in structuring and circulating these assets.
Excluding stablecoins, the structural breakdown of tokenized assets is as follows:
- U.S. Treasury debt instruments — 45.75%
- Commodities — 18.7%
- Alternative investment funds — 13.43%
- Private credit products — 11.42%
- Public equities — 4.03%
- Sovereign debt outside the U.S. — 3.57%
- Equity stakes in private companies and funds — 2.14%
- Actively managed investment portfolios — 0.85%
- Corporate bonds — 0.1%
It’s worth noting that, from a purely technical standpoint, stablecoins also qualify as tokenized assets, since they’re backed by fiat currency and traditional financial instruments. That said, this category of digital assets is typically treated as a separate segment. A more detailed review of 2025 outcomes in the context of stablecoin market development is available in a dedicated CP Media article.
A clear illustration of the market’s institutionalization can be found in the tokenized U.S. Treasury segment. As of the end of 2025, the average size of a single tokenized product in this category stood at about $180 million. More than 30% of products had a circulating market value exceeding $100 million, while over 50% surpassed the $10 million threshold. This distribution points to the dominance of large, institutionally oriented structures rather than experimental or retail-focused issuances.
Institutional Adoption of Tokenization Accelerates
Throughout 2025, more than 80 large-scale asset tokenization initiatives were launched, many of them involving the world’s largest financial institutions.
Some of the most illustrative examples include:
- The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) outlined plans to support tokenization as a way to improve efficiency and foster innovation in the asset management sector.
- The London Stock Exchange (LSE) announced the launch of a blockchain-based tokenization platform aimed at accelerating and simplifying transactions involving traditional financial assets in private markets.
- Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, tokenized a portion of one of its money-market funds, using the Ethereum network to enable transparent recordkeeping and transaction traceability.
- BNY Mellon and Goldman Sachs, two of the largest U.S. investment banks, disclosed plans to launch a platform for tokenizing money-market funds.
- Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the largest clearinghouse in the U.S., backed further development of tokenization initiatives.
- Ant Digital Technologies tokenized more than $8.4 billion worth of energy infrastructure assets in China.
- Alibaba’s commerce arm announced the rollout of international payments using tokenized deposits to accelerate cross-border euro and dollar transactions, including through JPMorgan solutions.
PMorgan’s tokenization initiatives warrant separate attention. They include:
- Shortening interbank transfer times through the use of tokenized deposits
- The launch of a tokenized money-market fund built on Ethereum
- A pilot project focused on tokenizing U.S. dollar deposits on Base, a layer-2 blockchain network
It’s important to note that the examples above represent only a portion of the significant regional and international institutional initiatives involving tokenization. Taken together, they underscore a broader trend toward adoption by the largest participants across multiple markets.
Liquidity Constraints and Secondary Market Challenges
Despite clear progress in the development of tokenization, the secondary market remains one of the sector’s key structural constraints. While issuance and primary placement processes for tokenized assets are now largely standardized and well established, secondary trading has evolved far less consistently. For a significant share of tokenized products, secondary turnover remains limited, with trading activity often sporadic and conducted over-the-counter. This dynamic weighs on liquidity and complicates the formation of stable market pricing.
As noted in a World Economic Forum (WEF) report, the core challenge lies not in the technological capabilities of tokenization but in a combination of market, regulatory, and infrastructure factors. In practice, the secondary market for tokenized assets faces several systemic limitations:
- High fragmentation across trading venues, networks, and jurisdictions
- The use of multiple token standards and limited infrastructure interoperability
- Regulatory barriers that complicate cross-border trading and investor access
- A narrow and often segmented participant base
- Insufficient liquidity, reflected in low trading volumes and limited market depth
As a result, institutional tokenization today is still largely implemented through hold-to-maturity structures, redemptions, or buybacks rather than through fully developed markets with active secondary trading. Until fragmentation and liquidity challenges are addressed systematically, tokenization’s potential as a market mechanism will remain only partially realized, despite its technological maturity and growing institutional interest.
The potential of secondary markets for tokenized assets is most clearly illustrated by Tether Gold, whose XAUT tokens trade actively across most cryptocurrency venues. According to CoinGecko, the asset’s market capitalization rose during 2025 from roughly $646 million to more than $2.3 billion. At the same time, average daily trading volume stood at about $1.54 billion over the course of the year, based on Yahoo Finance data, ranging from $2.3 million in February to more than $18.7 billion in November.
Conclusions and Outlook: The Next Phase for Tokenization
The results of 2025 suggest that tokenization should be viewed not as a temporary technological trend but as a long-term driver of financial market transformation. The core infrastructure for issuing and recording tokenized assets is now largely in place, and future progress will depend on how effectively market participants can scale liquidity and integrate tokenization into existing financial frameworks.
Long-term projections point to the scale of potential change. According to estimates from Standard Chartered Bank and Synpulse, the market for tokenized assets could reach $1.3 trillion by 2030 and exceed $30 trillion by 2034. These projections imply that tokenization will move well beyond isolated products and become a mainstream mechanism for capital allocation.
Importantly, this view is shared by key institutional bodies. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) sees tokenization as a foundation of the future monetary and financial system, centered on unified ledgers that combine tokenized central bank reserves, commercial bank deposits, and sovereign bonds. This perspective underscores that tokenization isn’t about building a parallel ecosystem but about a deep restructuring of core market infrastructure.
A similar view is shared by the largest players in asset management. According to BlackRock’s leadership, widespread adoption of tokenization represents the next stage in the evolution of financial markets. It would allow nearly any asset, from real estate to corporate debt, to be converted into digital form. That shift simplifies the transfer of ownership rights and reduces operating costs.
From a practical standpoint, the market’s next phase of development is likely to follow several paths:
- Expanded use of tokenization in segments with strong institutional demand and relatively simple structures
- Gradual consolidation of trading infrastructure and the emergence of more connected secondary markets
- Active involvement of central banks and systemically important financial institutions in setting standards
- Deeper integration of tokenized assets into existing settlement, clearing, and liquidity management processes
In this context, 2025 can be seen as a period of rapid growth alongside gradual institutional adoption and infrastructure development. The market’s next step is a shift from technological readiness to true market maturity, grounded in liquidity, standards, and institutional trust. This phase will determine whether tokenization becomes a cornerstone of a new financial architecture or remains a highly effective but ultimately niche tool.
