Odaily Planet Daily News: As stablecoins validate product-market fit (PMF) in 2025, the crypto industry is pushing "on-chain dollars" to play a more significant role by tokenizing assets such as stocks, ETFs, money market funds, and gold, serving as tradable building blocks for on-chain finance. Several industry executives anticipate that the market size for tokenized assets could grow to approximately $400 billion by 2026.
Samir Kerbage, Chief Investment Officer of Hashdex, stated that the current size of tokenized assets is approximately $36 billion. He noted that the next phase of growth will stem more from structural reshaping of value transfer methods rather than speculative demand alone. He pointed out that as stablecoins mature as "on-chain cash," capital will naturally flow into investable assets, serving as a bridge between digital currencies and digital capital markets.
According to reports, the scale of tokenized assets is approaching $20 billion in the 2020s, with traditional financial institutions such as BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of New York Mellon deeply involved. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino believes that 2026 will be a pivotal year for banks to move from pilot projects to real-world deployment, especially in emerging markets, where tokenization can help issuers bypass limitations of traditional infrastructure.
In addition, Centrifuge's COO, Jürgen Blumberg, expects that by the end of 2026, the total value locked (TVL) in on-chain real-world assets (RWA) could exceed $100 billion, with more than half of the world's top 20 asset management firms launching tokenized products. Carlos Domingo, CEO of Securitize, noted that natively tokenized stocks and ETFs will gradually replace synthetic asset models and become important high-quality collateral within DeFi.
CoinDesk believes that legal clarity, cross-chain interoperability, and a unified identity system remain key prerequisites for the expansion of the tokenized market. However, industry consensus has shifted from "whether to go on-chain" to "the scale and speed of going on-chain." (CoinDesk)