What Is Tokenisation of Real-World Assets?
Putting Treasury bills and property on a blockchain, which sounds like 2018 and this time has actual money in it. Mostly boring assets, and the boring part is why it is working.
TL;DR
- Tokenised real-world assets reached about 31 billion dollars on public blockchains by July 2026, up more than 400% since early 2025.
- Government debt dominates. Tokenised US Treasuries stood at roughly 13.5 billion dollars in May 2026.
- BlackRock's BUIDL fund launched in March 2024 and passed 2.5 billion dollars by May 2026, running across eight different blockchains.
- The token is a claim on something a company holds off-chain, so the blockchain removes settlement friction rather than removing the middleman.
In February 2026 a BlackRock fund started trading on Uniswap. Read that again, because every word in it would have been a joke five years ago: the world's largest asset manager, running a regulated institutional product, on a decentralised exchange with no counter and no opening hours.
Tokenising real-world assets was a 2018 idea that mostly produced conference panels. Property was going to be split into tokens, fine art was going to trade in fractions, and almost none of it happened. It has come back with actual money behind it, and the difference is what is being tokenised: not paintings, but government debt. Educational guide, not financial advice.
What the words mean
A real-world asset token is a claim on something that exists off the blockchain, recorded on it. The blockchain holds the ledger of who owns what and moves those entries around. It does not hold the Treasury bill, and the Treasury bill has not become magic.
The chain is doing one job: settlement. Ownership transfers in seconds, at any hour, without the multi-day choreography of custodians and clearing houses that normally sits behind a securities trade. Everything about the underlying asset stays exactly where it was, including who holds it and who is regulated for doing so.
The numbers, which are the interesting part
By July 2026 tokenised real-world assets on public blockchains stood at around 31 billion dollars, more than 400% up on early 2025, held by close to 960,000 holders across 167 platforms.
Tokenised US Treasuries make up the largest slice, at roughly 13.5 billion dollars in May 2026. BlackRock's institutional fund, BUIDL, launched in March 2024 and had passed 2.5 billion by May 2026, distributing over 100 million dollars in dividends since inception and deployed across Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, Aptos and BNB Chain. Ondo's USYC sat at about 3 billion and Franklin Templeton's FOBXX at roughly 844 million.
Why boring assets and not the exciting ones
Property tokenisation stalled because the token was never the obstacle. Selling a fraction of a building still requires a legal structure that makes the fraction mean something, a registry that recognises it, a buyer who wants it, and a way to handle the sale when one holder among four hundred wants out. The blockchain solves none of that.
A money market fund has none of those problems. It is already fungible, regulated and valued daily, and its buyers are institutions who move large sums between instruments constantly and find settlement delay genuinely expensive. Tokenising it removes a real cost from a real workflow.
That is the pattern: this works where settlement friction is the actual pain and the asset is already standardised. It stalls wherever the difficulty was legal rather than technical.
What it is not
Not decentralised in the sense people often assume. A token backed by Treasury bills depends completely on the company holding those bills and honouring redemptions. If that company fails, the token on the chain will keep displaying a balance that no longer corresponds to anything. The trust sits exactly where it always did.
Not open to everyone either. Most of the tokenised funds carrying real volume are restricted to qualified or institutional investors, with transfers limited to approved addresses. The token moves on a public chain while the permission to hold it does not.
And the eye-catching projections deserve a health warning. A Boston Consulting Group and Ripple report put the market at 18.9 trillion dollars by 2033, which is a forecast produced partly by firms with an interest in the outcome, not a measurement. The measured number is 31 billion, and that is the one to anchor on.
Why it matters if none of it is for you
Two reasons, both indirect.
The first is that it puts serious institutions on public blockchains for commercial reasons rather than experimental ones. Infrastructure built to satisfy a fund administrator tends to be more durable than infrastructure built to satisfy enthusiasts.
The second is convergence. Tokenised funds, stablecoins and deposit tokens are three answers to the same question about what money looks like when settlement is instant. They are being built by different sorts of company with different regulators, and the version that ends up in ordinary products will probably borrow from all three.
Frequently Asked Questions
A token recording a claim on something that exists off the blockchain: Treasury bills, money market fund shares, credit, commodities, occasionally property. The chain keeps the ownership ledger and settles transfers. The underlying asset stays with a regulated custodian exactly as before.
About 31 billion dollars on public blockchains as of July 2026, up more than 400% since early 2025, across 167 platforms and close to 960,000 holders. Tokenised US Treasuries are the largest category at roughly 13.5 billion in May 2026. Projections of trillions are forecasts, not measurements.
Most of the funds carrying real volume are restricted to qualified or institutional investors, with transfers permitted only between approved addresses. The token moves on a public chain but the permission to hold it does not, so availability to individuals is limited and varies by jurisdiction.
Because the blockchain was never the blocker. Fractional property ownership needs a legal structure the fraction fits into, a registry that recognises it and a workable exit for individual holders. Money market funds have none of those problems, which is why they went first.
It carries different risk rather than less. Both are claims on an issuer holding assets off-chain, and if that issuer fails the token keeps showing a balance regardless. Tokenised funds are typically issued under securities rules with named administrators, which changes the disclosure regime rather than removing the dependency.
About the author — Dan Clarke
Dan Clarke is the author of Bitcoin: The Complete Guide and a former content lead at Binance Academy, where he wrote crypto education for readers arriving with no background in the subject. He has worked in the cryptocurrency industry since 2017. His rule for these guides: plain language first, precision where it matters, no cheerleading.