**The Real State of Tokenization: Experts React to the RWA Market’s Liquidity Problem**
A new BeInCrypto Intelligence report, built with market data from RWA.xyz and feedback from BeInCrypto’s Expert Council, tracks roughly $60 billion in tokenized real-world assets across more than 7,000 products and 12 asset classes. The findings show a market that is growing, but still narrow.
Just 62 assets hold 88% of total value. Five products account for roughly half the market: Figure HELOC, Circle USYC, Tether Gold, BlackRock BUIDL, and Justoken JMWH. Across 1,289 tokenized assets valued above $100,000, 910 assets worth $32.9 billion showed zero weekly transfers. Meanwhile, 97% of the market sits outside US retail reach, with only about $1.7 billion legally accessible to US retail investors. Tokenized stocks are growing fast by product count, but 59% provide synthetic price exposure rather than actual ownership.
These findings raise a direct question: is tokenization failing to deliver on liquidity, or is the market still in an early infrastructure phase? BeInCrypto asked five industry executives to respond.
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### **Securitize: The First Phase Was Never About Public Trading**
Tal Elyashiv, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of SPiCE Venture Capital and Co-Founder of Securitize, argued that the report’s findings on tokenizing equities point to a real structural issue.
> “My stance on what the report shows about tokenizing shares/equity, is that this tokenization needs to be at the source. Tokenization that does not include full ownership is problematic at best, and completely wrong IMHO. This is exactly what Securitize is doing.”
Elyashiv also highlighted that low transfer activity should not always be read as failure—many early tokenized products were designed for institutional issuance, compliance, and settlement rather than public secondary trading.
> “Many of the first assets tokenized were funds (VC funds, private funds). Tokenization in these cases was not done to facilitate retail/public trading, but rather to upgrade institutional issuance infrastructure, compliance, and settlement. BUIDL for example, was created for institutional TradFi and DeFi use cases (and this is what it serves).”
That view matches one of the report’s central distinctions: some assets are *Distributed* and can move across public blockchain rails, while others are *Represented*, using blockchain mainly as a digital record of an off-chain position.
> “The previous stage needed to succeed and show resilience, as well as regulatory clarity, before moving to the public trading stage. But we are entering that phase.”
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### **Raiku: Activity Depends on Predictable Execution**
Robin Nordnes, CEO and Founder of Raiku, said the dormancy data points to a deeper infrastructure problem. More than half of tokenized market value showed no weekly transfer activity, and Nordnes argued this is not mainly about asset quality or regulation.
> “The dormancy finding doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t think it’s primarily a regulatory story or an asset quality story. What we hear consistently from institutional allocators is that they won’t actively manage capital on-chain until they can answer two questions with confidence: will my transaction execute, and when…”
He explained that uncertainty around settlement timing affects spreads, liquidity buffers, and portfolio decisions for active trading, collateral management, or daily fund operations.
> “The transaction fee is actually the smaller part of the problem. The bigger cost of execution uncertainty is everything that sits around it: the wider spreads you need to run if you can’t guarantee timing, the liquidity buffers you hold because you might not execute when you need to, the positions you simply don’t take because the uncertainty makes the trade unmodelable.”
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### **D3: The Weak Spots Show Where Growth May Come From**
The report found that only one of 12 asset classes has reached production-grade maturity: US Treasury debt. Fred Hsu, Co-Founder and CEO of D3, said that finding should not be read only as a weakness—it shows where tokenization may have the most room to create value.
> “Only treasuries have reached production grade so far, and almost every other class is still concentrated or experimental. That looks like a weakness, but it is really a map of where the value is. The classes that never matured are the fragmented, illiquid markets traditional finance never priced well, because tracking ownership and moving value cost too much. The asset was always real, what was missing was a way to reach it. The infrastructure that finally reaches those markets is what decides where the next phase of growth will come from.”
Treasuries are easier to tokenize because the asset class is liquid, familiar, and easier for institutions to assess, while more complex assets—including private credit, commodities, real estate, and tokenized equities—still face legal, operational, and distribution barriers.
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### **TransFi: Stablecoins Show Where Tokenization Already Works**
Raj Kamal, Founder and CEO of TransFi, noted that the report’s findings should be considered alongside stablecoins, which are excluded from its core $60 billion RWA market figure.
> “In my view, the real RWA tokenization that is solving real world problems is stablecoins. Where there is a tokenization happening of a real world asset—the US dollar. Through USDC and USDT, billions of dollars of stablecoins are making remittances, B2B flows, payroll & freelancer payments, ecommerce checkouts, corporate treasury flows and forex flows and many other payments faster, easier, more predictable and cheaper.”
Stablecoins demonstrate that tokenization works when the product solves a clear workflow problem, even as liquidity gaps persist in tokenized securities and funds.
> “And the proof points come from an ever-increasing number of large traditional institutions looking to get into stablecoin issuance, Western Union, PayPal, Banks and others. And the reality is that we are just scratching the surface of the multi-trillion dollar traditional payments that is likely to move on to stablecoins. We should be celebrating this clear game changer in global payments as proof of RWAs working.”
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### **Brickken: The Market Is Still Building the Access Layer**
Edwin Mata, CEO of Brickken, said the report’s numbers reflect a market still early in institutional adoption. The first phase focused on trust, regulatory readiness, and compliant infrastructure; the next phase will depend on whether tokenized assets become easier to access and use.
> “These numbers make sense and reflect the current state of the market, tokenization is still early in institutional adoption and that’s how it was supposed to be. The first phase was always about trust: proving the tech works, meeting regulatory bars, getting compliant infrastructure in place. In essence, that groundwork isn’t wasted time but rather the foundation on which everything else will be built.”
He compared the path ahead to stablecoins, arguing that tokenized assets will grow when they solve practical business problems, not simply because they exist on-chain.
> “Tokenized markets are heading the same direction, as regulation clarifies (Clarity Act or MiCA in Europe is a good example) and infrastructure matures, the winners will ultimately be whoever builds the access layer: discovery, interoperability layers, the infrastructure that turns a tokenized asset from a static record into something businesses and institutions can actually rely and build on.”
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### **The Takeaway: Tokenization Has Value, But Not Yet Depth**
The report does not show that tokenization is dead—it shows that the market is still early in its structure. The assets exist, major institutions are involved, and treasuries have reached production-grade maturity. But much of the market remains concentrated, restricted, or inactive on-chain.
That makes the next phase clear: tokenization will not scale only by minting more assets. It needs better settlement, compliance, distribution, execution, and access.
The first phase proved that real value can be represented on-chain. The next phase will determine whether those assets can become active financial markets.
*Read the full BeInCrypto Intelligence report [here](https://www.beincrypto.com/).*
**Source:** *BeInCrypto. “The Real State of Tokenization: Experts React to the RWA Market’s Liquidity Problem.”* (Date from post metadata).
*(Note: Citations follow the source page structure; figures and quotes are attributed as listed in the original article.)*
