Tokenized real-world assets have more than doubled in a year to just past $32 billion. Fixed income leads at $16.5 billion, with US Treasuries making up 88% of it. Equities are the smallest c
On-chain tokenized real-world assets had moved past $32 billion as of August 2026, more than double where the market sat a year ago, according to figures compiled from Dune’s dataset covering roughly 3,000 products across 21 blockchains. US Treasuries remain the gravitational center of that total, yet the fastest-moving activity has drifted toward assets and instruments that barely registered twelve months ago. What now separates the serious markets from the experiments is the composition of that $32 billion, not the headline number.
Outstanding tokenized supply by class, month end. Source: Dune. Fixed income makes up more than half the market and grew 111% over the year, with US Treasuries accounting for 88% of that slice. Credit sits at $7.6 billion but punches above its weight, holding three-quarters of all collateral used in real-world-asset lending. Commodities reach $5.5 billion, roughly a third of it parked at exchanges. Equities are the smallest class at $2.5 billion, and that is where the interesting divergence shows up: tokenized equities count around 872,000 holders against just 69,000 in fixed income. The thinnest category by value carries by far the widest ownership. Retail is crowding into equities. The institutional money is still parked in Treasuries.
Asset classOn-chain supplyWhat stands outFixed income$16.5B88% of it US Treasuries, up 111%Credit$7.6BHolds 76% of all RWA lending collateralCommodities$5.5BAbout 30% sitting at exchangesEquities$2.5B872k holders versus 69k in fixed incomeThe supply figures only tell half the story, because a growing share of on-chain exposure never touches a token at all. There are two ways to bet on a stock or a bar of gold here: hold a token backed by the real asset, or trade a perpetual contract that simply tracks its price. On Hyperliquid, the second route has overtaken the first. Perpetuals on equities and commodities rose from 0.2% of the venue’s volume last October to 51% this July, and gold and equity perp trading grew about 30-fold to $114 billion a month. On those two markets, close to 97% of volume clears on the perpetual rather than the token. Open interest across these real-world-asset perpetuals sits near $2.0 billion, with equity exposure climbing every month since October to $1.54 billion, while commodities peaked around $500 million in April and have gone flat.
Open interest on HIP-3 perpetual markets, Hyperliquid. Source: Dune. That exposure comes with a meter running. A perpetual never expires, so a recurring payment called funding keeps its price tethered to the underlying asset. When funding is positive, the traders betting on a rise pay the traders on the other side; when it turns negative, the flow reverses. Over the past year, holding these contracts has cost somewhere between 5% and 14% annually, depending on the market.
MarketAnnual cost to holdWhat it means for a holderCopper8-14%Positive every month since February; longs keep payingNvidia and gold3-9%A steady premium to stay longS&P 500~0%Within 0.07% of zero, effectively free to hold all yearSpaceX-7.7%Flipped from 11.5% in July; shorts now pay longsThe gap between a real token and a synthetic one is not academic, and it surfaced publicly this month. Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev used a September 11 post on X to define when a public company can block a stock token tied to its shares, after AMC Entertainment chief Adam Aron demanded Robinhood stop trading a token carrying AMC’s name and threatened to take the matter to the SEC. Tenev’s answer draws a line: if a product changes the rights attached to the shares, replaces the company’s official ledger, or loads new obligations onto the issuer, the company belongs in the conversation. If it creates a separate instrument that only references freely transferable shares, he argues, consent should not be required.
Robinhood’s Stock Tokens sit firmly on the second side of that line. They are tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited, not by AMC, each backed one-for-one by a share held with US custodian Alpaca Securities. Holders get price exposure and reinvested dividends but no voting rights and no legal claim against the underlying company. The products stay out of the United States, the UK, Canada and Switzerland, and more than 190 of them now trade. Aron counters that the structure decouples token ownership from a company’s control over its own capital raising, and whether he has any legal standing to force a halt is still unsettled.
The synthetic model is not the only path scaling right now. India moved in the opposite direction. SEBI and the Reserve Bank of India launched a pilot called Demat 2.0 at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai on September 10, issuing corporate bonds as native digital tokens on a permissioned ledger run by regulated market institutions. The cash leg settles in the RBI’s wholesale digital rupee, so the bond and the payment move in the same step and settlement risk on that side disappears. India is the first jurisdiction to issue corporate bonds as native tokens on a ledger owned by its own regulated institutions.
Three issuers went first:
CDSL, NSDL, BSE, NSE, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and NPCI all sit inside the pilot. Secondary-market trading is expected by December 2026, with retail access held back for a later phase. The pilot targets a corporate bond market worth around $620 billion. Where Robinhood wraps a share in an offshore debt security, India put the actual instrument on the ledger and had the central bank clear the money, which is close to the opposite end of the structure spectrum.
Most current tokenization models, Robinhood’s included, run two records at once: the token on-chain and the authoritative shareholder register somewhere else. The SEC has proposed collapsing that. On September 1 the agency put forward its first substantial rewrite of transfer-agent rules in about four decades, with a provision that would let a registered transfer agent keep its master securityholder file on a blockchain as the official record, as long as the agent retains exclusive control. The proposal stops short of turning a blockchain into a transfer agent, leaves the Uniform Commercial Code and state law untouched, and keeps identity checks and transfer limits embedded in the token. Comments close on November 3.
The $32 billion figure will keep climbing, but the more consequential question is which structure the rules end up favoring. That comment window will start to draw the boundary between an issuer’s securities and a third party’s product, the exact line the Robinhood dispute exposed. Capital is not waiting for the answer. Nasdaq’s venture arm committed $100 million on September 10 to Kraken’s parent, Payward, to stand up Nasdaq Equity Tokens on the xStocks platform, with trading targeted for mid-2027, and Wells Fargo has lined up a Cosmos-based cross-border tokenized deposit pilot for this fall. For anyone holding these products, the structure they picked decides what they actually own, and whether a court could unwind it. The market has already proven it can grow. What it has not settled is whether the future belongs to the real token, the synthetic wrapper, or the central-bank-cleared bond.
The post Tokenized Real-World Assets Hit $32B, Led by Treasuries appeared first on ETHNews.
