RWA in Retrospect: Fourteen Years—From the Colored Coins Idea to a $1 Trillion Track

STO in the harsh winter, BlackRock enters the scene, regulatory games unfold—a tokenization journey spanning two generations of practitioners.
Written by: Seth
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
In March 2012, Israeli developer Yoni Assia proposed the concept of colored coins: to attach markers to specific Bitcoins so they can represent real-world assets such as stocks, bonds, and title deeds.
Unfortunately, this vision never managed to move beyond the whitepaper stage. But it raised a question that many people would continue to explore for the next fourteen years: how to enable illiquid real-world assets to circulate freely, just like cash.
Fourteen years later, excluding stablecoins, the size of tokenized assets that can be freely traded reached $38.29 billion. The committed capital injected totals $369.44 billion, with 1.79 million holders in total.
This article lays out, stage by stage, the full process tokenization has gone through so far, and analyzes why this road has been so long.
What is asset tokenization
Tokenized assets are instruments of entitlement to real-world assets. The underlying can be short-term Treasury bills, gold bars, credit, or hotel equity—carried on-chain in the form of tokens.
The token itself has no independent value. Off-chain, the real assets are held by a custodian, a fund manager, or a trust entity, and they recognize the token as a valid instrument for redeeming underlying assets. The logic is consistent with the relationship between stock certificates, bearer bonds, and the corresponding underlying assets.
The incremental value brought by blockchain is limited but real: it records ownership of claims, enables near-instant (second-level), 24/7 settlement and delivery of ownership without intermediaries matching trades. Strip away the technical shell, and this is an old financial idea. What truly innovates is trading speed, the asset participation parties, and the way assets are used.
Early builders and the first generation’s dilemmas
Long before the industry believed tokenization could be scaled and deployed, a few early pioneers first had to prove it was feasible. In 2017, Lucas Vogelsang and Martin Quensel founded Centrifuge. In its first four years, the team focused deeply on the Tinlake system, providing financing services to real-world accounts receivable and physical assets through a tiered recycling capital pool.
In mid-2021, Centrifuge launched the first RWA funding pool that connected to MakerDAO (now the Sky ecosystem). It minted the first batch of DAI backed by real-world assets, and the plan was successfully implemented.
The same pattern appears in real estate. In October 2018, the real-estate operating company Elevated Returns completed a $18 million financing for an Aspenridge Hotel equity-tokenization deal representing 18.9% of the property’s $224 million valuation. It tokenized the stake valued at $22.4 million and issued $1 face-value tokens to qualified investors via Templum Markets. This was also the first large-scale tokenized commercial real-estate transaction on a blockchain.
A few months later, a tokenized auction was completed in the same way—31.6% equity of a $5.6 million Andy Warhol painting.
Both token issuances proceeded smoothly as planned, but afterward things stalled. Once minting was completed, the market lacked counterparties—there was no liquidity to speak of.
In September 2019, Paxos launched PAXG, the first gold token approved by the New York financial regulator. That same year, Tether launched XAUT, backed by Swiss vault reserves and competing with Paxos’s gold stored in the London Brink’s vaults. At the time, neither product managed to attract institutions at large scale. Seven years later, both are still operating normally, with market caps of $1.9 billion and $2.7 billion respectively. This also shows that the tokenization model for commodities had already worked long before the Treasury tokenization hype took off.
Regulatory rules have lagged far behind innovation. In 2017, the SEC published the (DAO Report), applying the Howey test to determine token offerings for the first time: whether a digital token is a security depends on the offering method, not the token’s name.
This conclusion spawned the security token offering (STO) track and also set up an eligibility barrier restricting participation to qualified investors only. Over the next four years, issuers kept launching different STO products, but legal restrictions still barred most potential traders from entering. A series of issues—thin order books, mandatory lock-up periods, unclear custodial liability scale, and more—caused this wave to effectively end in 2021. That same year, Augur’s predicted peak active user count was only 265, and then it shrank to 37.
Industry challenges in the long run
All kinds of assets are being tokenized, but most tokens remain idle long-term with no one trading them. According to Forbes data, currently 88% of the market value in RWAs is concentrated in 62 underlying asset targets. Only five products—Figure housing credit funds, Circle’s USYC, Tether gold, BlackRock’s BUIDL, and the JMWH funds under Justokenglobal—account for nearly half of the total market size.
After most tokens are minted, the market largely forgets them. Even within the top assets where concentration is as high as 88%, less than 10% of tokenized value is actually activated and used as DeFi collateral or to participate in lending loops.
The root issue isn’t a lack of demand. Even before 2024, capital wanted to allocate to tokenized Treasuries and gold. The real obstacle is that unless there are trusted, licensed institutions to handle custody, asset transfers, and compliance processes, no institution is willing to endorse such assets. Before BlackRock entered, no sufficiently credible entity could validate this business model at a meaningful scale.
How tokenization gets to disruptive adoption
What the tokenization industry lacks is not better products, but a “kingmaker” big player that other institutions widely trust and are willing to publicly endorse this track.
In March 2024, BlackRock delivered this answer—launching the BUIDL tokenized fund, with the compliant platform Securitize responsible for tokenization and operational management. Securitize was founded in 2017 by Carlos Domingo and Jamie Finn.
Carlos Domingo previously ran an early security token fund called SPiCE VC, which is also an important reason BlackRock chose Securitize when seeking a partnership.
Today, BUIDL issues across more than 10 public chains with a total size of $2.8 billion, custody by JPMorgan and audited by PwC, with a 7-day yield of 3.42%. BlackRock’s entry has made boards of major asset managers start taking the tokenization track seriously—an effect that the STO wave over the past four years had never managed to deliver.
Additional context: Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund launched on Stellar back in April 2021. It was the first U.S. registered public mutual fund to use a public chain as its official accounting system—three years earlier than BUIDL. The fund now operates cross-chain: deployed as an EVM version (iBENJI) on BNB Chain and Ethereum, with a size of $1.72 billion, and native Stellar token size of $712.5 million.
Credit and yield infrastructure
After top-level asset packaging schemes took shape, the industry’s middle layer needed a trading market that matches borrowing and lending counterparties. In 2019, Sid Powell and Joe Flanagan launched Maple Finance, a platform that suffered severe setbacks during its growth.
In December 2022, the borrower Orthogonal Trading concealed its risk exposure to the fallout of FTX, leading to a $36 million loan default. Within a week, the platform’s active lending volume shrank by about 30%. Powell at the time admitted, “shocked and disappointed,” and rebuilt the platform’s risk controls based on this crisis: widening borrower eligibility rather than relying solely on agents’ one-sided risk-disclosure reporting.
So far, Maple has issued loans totaling more than $20 billion. Its syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT products together total $1.9 billion, making it the tokenized private-credit platform with by far the largest scale.
Two years later, Nathan Allman, a senior digital-asset professional at Goldman Sachs, founded Ondo. Its core product, OUSG, was the first tokenized Treasuries token that can be transferred peer-to-peer. USDY is the first yield stablecoin with no whitelisting/entry threshold. Current size: USDY at $2.145 billion and OUSG at $449 million. Ondo is also the largest on-chain distribution channel for BUIDL. Unfortunately, founder Nathan Allman passed away unexpectedly in May 2026.
Oracles and data infrastructure
On-chain smart contracts can reliably read off-chain asset prices and fund net asset values (NAV)—this is the foundation for all application deployments. At present, the market is largely divided among four major networks:
RedStone: In March 2025, Securitize selected RedStone as its core oracle partner. Today, RedStone provides daily NAV data feeds for all Securitize tokenized funds, including BUIDL, Apollo ACRED, VanEck VBILL, and Hamilton Lane SCOPE. Before integrating, tokens issued by Securitize lacked real-time quotes—while fund shares exist on-chain, the lending protocol couldn’t access real-time valuation. With RedStone’s pricing feeds, ACRED can generate yield on Morpho, and VBILL can serve as collateral on Euler. Currently, RedStone safeguards on-chain assets spanning 110 blockchains with a size of about $6 billion. Most of it supports institutional fund pricing rather than native crypto tokens.
Pyth Network: targets the other end of the market—speed first, with complex NAV calculations deprioritized. It uses a pull-based model, suitable for high-frequency trading instruments: stocks, FX, and commodities. It supports more than 750 U.S.-listed stock trading pairs and multi-maturity U.S. Treasury interest-rate data. Ondo chooses Pyth to provide quotes for USDY yield tokens, covering 65 blockchains. Even outside Securitize’s tech stack, Ondo’s own Treasury products still have an independent, trusted price data source.
DIA: focuses on verifiability and end-to-end transparency from data sources to smart contracts. The xReal suite covers more than 100 RWA price indicators, including stocks, ETFs, FX, and bond yield rates. Stellar and Ripple both choose DIA when advancing RWA partnerships. In compliance processes, institutions tend to prefer fully audited data-source logic rather than relying solely on branding endorsements—DIA precisely matches this need.
Chainlink: covers the business that the other three parties have not ventured into—data transfer and asset interoperability across blockchains that don’t trust each other, and it does not directly handle fund pricing. Its CCIP channels distribute DTCC smart NAV data to support a pilot involving SWIFT and UBS in Singapore (the Guardian project). The project began in May 2022 and completed UBS’s first real tokenized-fund pilot in October 2023. Last quarter, CCIP cross-chain transfers totaled $4.9 billion, up 353% year over year. The network secured a total asset value of $110 billion. Just on the Mantle public chain alone, the token volume routed via CCIP this year exceeds $2.5 billion. DTCC is embedding Chainlink infrastructure into its collateral application chains, aiming to go live in Q4 2026.
Building distribution channels
Asset packaging issuance and market distribution are two completely independent problems.
The Mantle network emerged from BitDAO. BitDAO received strong support from the exchange Bybit, and at its peak the treasury size rivaled that of the Ethereum Foundation. In 2023, BitDAO merged into Mantle, fully taking over the treasury assets. At the time, it held nearly $300 million in stablecoins and 270,000 ETH. Today, the treasury has expanded to $2.4 billion. Mantle already has, from day one, funds that most early-stage teams would need years of fundraising to obtain. Currently, Mantle has launched more than 155 tokenized stock products and has surpassed $1 billion in DeFi liquidity. On August 6, leveraging CCIP-built connectivity, Mantle expanded its RWA infrastructure to Solana—marking the first time the ecosystem’s output went to a public chain it doesn’t own. 
Coinbase and Binance focus on the collateral-and-asset aggregation track. BUIDL has launched on the BNB Chain and can be used directly as collateral on Binance.
MEXC is one of the most comprehensive exchanges. It launched over 105 Ondo tokenized stock trading pairs and also supports PAXG, XAUT, and tokenized RWA infrastructure tokens. Just in August, it added five new underlying assets covering AI infrastructure and rare-earth segments. In Q1 2026, the platform captured 27% of the global tokenized gold trading volume, ranking second globally. This month, MEXC upgraded its RealStocks product. Backed by an exchange-broker partnership, it covers more than 7,000 U.S. stocks and ETFs. New features allow token holders to fully correspond to real shareholder rights.
The fastest-growing categories are not limited to spot-market listings. Hyperliquid’s and Binance’s RWA perpetual contracts saw $61.7 billion in weekly trading volume by late July—equivalent to 99.2% of the combined Bitcoin perpetual contract volume on both platforms during the same period. Tokenized stocks accounted for 58% of that. On Hyperliquid, the RWA perpetual trading volume has already surpassed the total volume of all the platform’s other categories combined.
Regulation gradually catches up with innovation pace
Four major regulatory lines are being advanced in parallel:
(GENIUS Act): the first federal stablecoin bill in U.S. history, signed into law on July 18, 2025 and taking effect.
(CLARITY Act): aims to establish market rules for the rest of the crypto industry’s assets. The bill passed the House one day earlier, and in May 2026 it passed the Senate Banking Committee by a vote of 15 to 9. It then got stuck in a stalemate: Democrats wanted to add conflict-of-interest provisions regarding digital-asset benefits for public officials, while Republicans hoped to remove the related content to move the legislation forward. On August 8, the Senate entered recess without a final vote. However, Senate Majority Leader Schumer submitted a motion to proceed with the final debate before the recess, scheduled for September 15 (the day after the lawmakers return from recess). This vote does not mean the bill is passed; it only means opening debate across the full chamber. Senate staff透露 externally that the controversy over conflict-of-interest provisions remains unresolved. If it gets tabled again in September, the midterm election schedule will significantly compress the remaining legislative window for this year.
The U.S. SEC chose an independent path. In March 2026, the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission jointly released a token classification framework, dividing digital assets into five major categories, with only “digital securities” fully falling under SEC regulation. SEC Chair Paul Atkins said in April at the Washington Economic Club: regulators “will soon issue” innovation exemption rules and set up a regulatory sandbox. Companies can trade tokenized securities on-chain within 12 to 36 months without completing the full registration process. Bloomberg reported in mid-May that the policy was about to take effect. On May 22, the SEC temporarily slowed down progress and sought the exchanges’ objections related to investor protection. As of mid-June, the latest update is that this exemption framework has still not been formally published.
Nasdaq, the NYSE, and DTCC chose not to wait. In March 2026, the SEC approved Nasdaq rule amendments, allowing Russell 1000 constituent stocks and index ETFs to conduct tokenized trading based on existing traditional trading infrastructure. A similar proposal from the NYSE was approved in April. DTCC, with collateral assets under custody of about $11.4 trillion, announced on May 4 that it would run production-grade pilots in July 2026 with more than 50 institutions participating, including BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs. The pilot covers Russell 1000 constituent stocks, mainstream index ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries, with full rollout planned for October. The system preserves all traditional rights such as shareholder voting and dividends. The core securities registration system remains unchanged; tokens are only a packaged carrier for settlement records.
The exemption framework originally set aside by the SEC would have opened a second, more permissive channel: tokens could be issued without authorization from underlying listed companies, and investors would only receive economic benefits without shareholder rights. Whether this second channel can materialize—and when—remains unknown. But even a pilot by DTCC alone is enough to prove that compliant tokenized trading of mainstream U.S. stocks will certainly come.
Has the liquidity problem been solved?
Based on the industry pain-point recap above, the fragmentation in liquidity has been partially alleviated. The Treasury and private-credit tracks have relatively sufficient liquidity, with volumes of $16.2 billion and $7.3 billion respectively—corresponding to 87 underlying assets and 2,543 underlying assets respectively.
Besides that, liquidity across the other tracks remains thin (most categories are under $1 billion). Custody trust issues for tier-one institutions like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton have been solved, but the smaller issuers still can’t crack it. Roughly 97% of tokenized assets still impose eligibility thresholds; ordinary retail investors can’t participate. The root cause traces back to the SEC’s Howey test standards in 2017.
The above is a relatively optimistic perspective. In July 2026, BeInCrypto Intelligence—leveraging data from RWA.xyz on more than 7,000 tokenized products—released a report revealing a harsher reality: for tokenized assets with a market cap over $100,000, 56% (about $32.9 billion) have zero on-chain transfer records within a single week. Putting assets on-chain and moving assets on-chain are completely different things. The industry has only completed the first step so far.
Some of the phenomena are part of the original product design intent: buying tokenized Treasuries to earn yield doesn’t need to look like trading speculative bonds day by day. But the objective reality can’t be avoided—there is a clear concentration at the top of the market. The five biggest products account for nearly half of market value, while the other six thousand-plus underlying assets are mostly dormant.
Future direction
Major institutions differ greatly in their numerical market-size forecasts, but they agree on the growth direction. McKinsey benchmark scenario prediction: tokenized assets reach $2–$4 trillion in the 2030s. Ark Invest predicts $11 trillion. A joint forecast by Boston Consulting Group and Rayliant: $94,000,000,000 (9.4 trillion) by 2030, rising to $18.9 trillion by 2033. Standard Chartered predicts it will exceed $30 trillion by 2034.
The numerical gap isn’t fundamentally about disagreement on whether growth will happen—everyone expects the market size to expand by 100 times compared with today. The disagreement comes from how the numbers are counted: whether stablecoins are included, whether bank deposits are included, and how the boundaries of “tokenization” are defined.
Institutions recognize growth expectations while staying cautious. In a January 2026 survey of 351 institutional decision-makers by Coinbase and Ernst & Young: 73% plan to increase digital-asset allocations within the year, and 65% cite “regulatory clarity” as the primary driver. Meanwhile, 66% of respondents also list regulatory uncertainty as the biggest risk. The core condition that would actually drive capital in is still unresolved.
Another Ernst & Young survey also shows that institutions don’t want to wait for regulation to land. 83% of institutional investors plan to allocate to tokenized bonds by the end of 2026; two years earlier, this figure was only 33%.
The shift is already reflected in the underlying infrastructure, not just in research questionnaires. In February 2026, BUIDL integrated UniswapX for direct trading. In March, it connected to a Chronicle verification system, allowing anyone to verify BlackRock’s underlying Treasury holdings in real time based on the bank custody records of JPMorgan (BofA?). In the Sky ecosystem, the Spark liquidity layer automatically reallocates $1.5 billion between BUIDL, Anemoy, and Superstateinc, routing in real time to the highest-yield target—work that used to rely on human traders operating capital manually.
DWF Labs co-founder r Andrei Grachev believes tokenized stocks have already reshaped traders’ behavior. Crypto investors don’t need to leave existing trading platforms—they can switch to allocating in stock assets and expect on-chain stocks and institutional-grade commodities to grow significantly this year. Falcon Finance’s Artem Tolkachev puts it plainly: composability and redemption mechanisms are what truly connect real-world assets with crypto liquidity.
Inside the industry, two development routes are diverging: one prioritizes ownership compliance first—building permissioned channels so that tokens operate entirely within the compliance boundaries; the other prioritizes composability—wrapping compliant assets like BUIDL so they can move freely throughout permissionless DeFi ecosystems.
This can be seen as the debate between RWA 1.0 and RWA 2.0, but it’s no longer theoretical now—there are two competing product roadmaps. Earlier this year, Circle’s USYC surpassed BlackRock’s BUIDL in size, becoming the largest tokenized Treasuries fund by volume. That means BUIDL has a temporary edge at the distribution layer, while the brand-impact story is a different matter.
RWA 1.0: simply map real-world assets; support only buy, hold, and redeem. Aspenridge Hotel tokens and Maple’s early lending fund pools both fall under this paradigm. RWA 2.0: let real-world assets continuously generate utility. In Q2 2026, the tokenized real-world asset value deposited across DeFi platforms reached $7.4 billion, up more than twofold year over year. Yield stablecoins and tokenized Treasuries make up the largest shares. Maple’s syrupUSDT is already officially live on Mantle with Aave, and the loop infrastructure for real capital is in place.