Real World Asset Tokenization: Why Demand Is Growing in 2026

How big the market is, and what counts

As of 2 October 2026, rwa.xyz counts $38.61B of "distributed" tokenised real-world assets, tokens investors can hold in their own wallets, and $446.28B of "represented" assets that use a chain only for record-keeping. Stablecoins (about $294.5B) are counted separately. The distributed figure is the one that matters for onchain finance.

The distinction is rwa.xyz's own and it is worth understanding before quoting any "RWA market" number. A distributed asset uses the blockchain as a distribution layer: you can subscribe, hold and transfer it from a wallet. A represented asset uses the chain as a ledger the issuer keeps for itself; investors cannot move it onchain. The largest single represented asset on rwa.xyz is Figure's HELOC token at about $23.4B, a loan book recorded on the Provenance chain. It is real, but it is not something a DeFi protocol or a wallet user can touch.

Measure (rwa.xyz, 2 Oct 2026)	Value	30-day change
Distributed asset value	$38.61B	−0.8%
Represented asset value	$446.28B	+17.8%
Total asset holders	5,060,927	+52.9%
Stablecoin value (not included above)	$294.54B	+0.9%

DefiLlama measures something different again. Its "RWA" category, which counts protocols rather than tokens, showed about $4.7B across 181 protocols on 2 October 2026, and lists the largest tokenised funds, such as BlackRock's BUIDL, with no TVL. The two sources are not interchangeable; for the size of tokenised assets, rwa.xyz's distributed figure is the closer measure.

On a twelve-month view the trend is clearly up. InvestaX's Q3 2026 report, citing rwa.xyz, puts distributed value at about $20.6B in August 2025 against roughly $38B a year later. Over the most recent 30 days, though, it was flat.

Growth by category

Tokenised US Treasury funds are the largest category at $14.75B, followed by commodities ($5.16B, almost all gold) and active strategies ($4.01B). Credit of all kinds totals $7.95B distributed. Tokenised stocks are smaller at $3.20B but grew fastest over the last 30 days, up 15%.

Category (distributed, rwa.xyz)	Value, 2 Oct 2026	Share	30-day change
US Treasury debt	$14.75B	38.1%	−7.4%
Credit (all non-sovereign debt)	$7.95B	~20%	+0.7%
Commodities	$5.16B	13.3%	+5.4%
Active strategies	$4.01B	10.4%	n/a
Stocks	$3.20B	8.3%	+15.0%
Private equity and venture	$2.35B	6.1%	n/a
Non-US government debt	$0.97B	2.5%	n/a
Real estate	$0.23B	0.6%	n/a

Treasuries. A few issuers dominate. The largest single products on 2 October 2026 were Circle's USYC ($2.40B), Ondo's USDY ($2.28B), BlackRock's BUIDL ($2.25B) and Franklin Templeton's institutional iBENJI ($1.71B). rwa.xyz shows a 7-day yield across tokenised Treasury funds of 3.60%. We compare the main funds in tokenised money market funds compared.

Private credit. rwa.xyz's credit category bundles private credit, onchain lending, corporate, structured and specialty credit. The largest distributed product is Maple's syrupUSDC at about $1.0B. Credit is where "tokenisation" claims deserve the most scrutiny, because the represented figure ($36.9B) is more than four times the distributed one.

Commodities. Tokenised gold is the category: Tether Gold (XAUT) at $2.95B and Paxos Gold (PAXG) at $1.81B account for over 90% of distributed commodity value.

Equities. Tokenised stocks are small in dollar terms but have the most holders by far: 4.21M, against 85,710 holders of tokenised Treasury funds. Most of the jump in rwa.xyz's total holder count comes from here.

Holders by category. rwa.xyz's holder counts show how differently each category is owned. On 2 October 2026 tokenised Treasury funds had 85,710 holders, credit 197,683, commodities 449,440 (up 42% in 30 days) and stocks 4.21M (up 61%). Treasuries hold the most money with the fewest owners; stocks the reverse. A market chart that adds these together mixes two very different kinds of demand.

The stablecoin backdrop. The same dashboard counts $294.5B of stablecoins held by 293.6M addresses. Distributed RWAs are about an eighth of that. Much of the case for tokenised Treasuries rests on this ratio: there is a very large pool of onchain dollars earning nothing for its holders, and a comparatively small set of yield-bearing alternatives that can live in the same wallets.

Who is buying

The money in tokenised Treasuries comes mainly from a small number of large holders: stablecoin issuers' reserves, DAO treasuries, funds of funds and trading firms posting collateral at exchanges. BlackRock's BUIDL, with $2.25B, had just 106 holders on rwa.xyz in October 2026, and Circle's USYC, with $2.40B, had 35.

Those holder counts tell the story better than any survey. A minimum investment of $5M for BUIDL (per rwa.xyz) rules out retail by design. The buyers that are documented publicly fall into four groups:

• DAO and protocol treasuries. Sky's Spark ran a "Tokenization Grand Prix" and in March 2025 named BlackRock/Securitize (BUIDL, $500M), Superstate (USTB, $300M) and Centrifuge (JTRSY, $200M) as recipients of a $1B allocation, with the funds intended to back Sky's USDS and sUSDS stablecoins once governance approved.
• Stablecoin reserves. Ethena's USDtb launched in December 2024 with 90% of its reserves in BUIDL, which Ethena described as the highest BUIDL allocation of any stablecoin.
• Funds holding funds. rwa.xyz describes Ondo's OUSG ($319.7M) as primarily holding BUIDL, alongside Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, Fidelity and Wellington vehicles. Some of the headline total is therefore one tokenised fund holding another.
• Exchange collateral. In September 2026 Bybit began accepting Franklin Templeton's Benji fund shares as off-exchange collateral for institutional credit lines, mirroring a Binance arrangement from February 2026, per crypto.news.

Why they buy: yield, settlement, collateral

Three reasons recur: a Treasury-like yield on dollars that would otherwise sit idle in stablecoins, settlement that runs around the clock rather than on banking hours, and an asset that can be posted as collateral while still earning. None of these is new in finance; what is new is getting all three in one token.

Onchain yield. A dollar stablecoin pays its holder nothing; the issuer keeps the reserve income. A tokenised money fund paid about 3.6% over seven days in late September 2026. For a treasury holding hundreds of millions in stablecoins, that is a large, obvious gap to close. Our stablecoin yield guide covers the alternatives and their risks.

Settlement. Franklin Templeton says BENJI accrues yield intraday "by the second" upon transfer and distributes dividends onchain every day, including weekends. That only matters if you move money outside banking hours, which crypto-native firms do constantly.

Collateral. An exchange or lender that accepts a tokenised fund lets a trader earn the fund yield on margin rather than holding idle stablecoins. That is the logic behind the Bybit and Binance arrangements and behind DeFi venues listing RWAs, which we cover in RWAs as DeFi collateral.

Where Stellar fits

Stellar is the fourth-largest network for distributed RWAs on rwa.xyz, with $3.44B across 72 assets as of 2 October 2026, about 8.9% of the total. Its RWA base is concentrated in a few large money-market issuers: Spiko, Franklin Templeton, Ondo, Realiz and Circle.

Network (rwa.xyz, 2 Oct 2026)	Distributed RWA value	Assets
Ethereum	$16.7B	2,846
BNB Chain	$5.7B	2,715
Solana	$4.3B	1,829
Stellar	$3.4B	49
Avalanche C-Chain	$1.7B	803

The asset count is the telling column: Stellar has few RWAs, but large ones. On rwa.xyz's Stellar page, Spiko accounts for $1.7B, Franklin Templeton's Benji tokens $582.8M and Ondo $536.8M. That fits Stellar's pitch to regulated issuers — native trustlines, authorisation flags and clawback — which we explain in why issuers tokenise on Stellar. Franklin's fund, the first US-registered fund on a public chain, launched there in 2021; see Franklin Templeton's BENJI on Stellar. At the smaller end, Etherfuse issues tokenised sovereign bonds on Stellar, covered in Etherfuse Stablebonds.

What the numbers do not tell you

• Concentration. A handful of funds with double- or triple-digit holder counts make up most of the Treasury category. A few redemptions can move the total by billions: Treasury funds fell 7.4% in the 30 days to 2 October 2026.
• Double counting. Funds that hold other tokenised funds (OUSG holding BUIDL) appear twice.
• Methodology. rwa.xyz now separates distributed from represented assets. We have not been able to confirm that the August 2025 figure was compiled on the same basis, so treat year-on-year growth as approximate.
• Holders are not users. Holder growth is mostly tokenised stocks; most Treasury tokens never touch a DeFi protocol.
• Legal claims sit offchain. A token is only as good as the fund structure, custodian and transfer agent behind it. See DeFi risks for how the chain and offchain layers fail differently.

The takeaway

Demand for tokenised RWAs is real and mostly unglamorous: large holders of dollars want Treasury yield without leaving the chain, and they want to post it as collateral. That has roughly doubled distributed value in a year. But it is a concentrated, institution-driven market, and the bigger "trillions" headlines usually count assets nobody can move onchain.

Sources: rwa.xyz (homepage, Treasuries, Credit, Commodities, Stocks and Stellar network pages, read 2 October 2026); DefiLlama protocols API (RWA category); InvestaX, "Q3 2026 Real-World Asset Tokenization Market Report" (3 September 2026); Spark Tokenization Grand Prix winners announcement (22 March 2025); crypto.news on USDtb (16 December 2024) and on Franklin Templeton and Bybit (28 September 2026); Stellar Development Foundation press release marking five years of BENJI.