Analysis3 min read
Real-world asset tokenisation is in the news because the market is changing shape. Token Terminal puts the total at $46.3 billion, with US Treasury bills at $13.3 billion of it: still the largest single category, but now less than a third of the total, as yield strategies and credit funds grow alongside them. CryptoBriefing. Leverage has followed the assets, with open interest in real-world asset perpetual futures reaching about $20 billion on 26 October. CryptoBriefing on CryptoRank data.
What the market holds now
Token Terminal's breakdown puts tokenised US Treasury bills at $13.3 billion, yield strategies at $11.6 billion and credit funds at $5.7 billion inside that $46.3 billion total. The trackers do not agree. rwa.xyz puts distributed on-chain RWA value, excluding stablecoins, at roughly $38 billion to $39 billion for September and October, and estimates for tokenised Treasuries alone run from $14 billion to $15 billion. The gap is method, and it matters to anyone comparing one dashboard with another. CryptoBriefing.
On the holder side the picture differs from the value side. The Block Research, in a report dated 5 October, counted 3.77 million tokenised stock holders in September, about 82% of everyone holding a real-world asset on chain, and later figures put the count near 5.3 million, 82.9% of an expanded base of 6.4 million. Tokenised stock value rose from $678 million at the start of 2026 to a peak of $3.15 billion in September. The research names bStocks, Robinhood and Kraken's xStocks as the main drivers, and says holders are concentrated on BNB Chain, Solana and Robinhood Chain. CryptoBriefing. In other words, the tokenised stock boom has reached far more people than it has moved value.
Leverage follows the assets
Perpetual futures are the other half of the story. Open interest in contracts tied to tokenised stocks, commodities and indices reached about $20 billion on 26 October, a rise of 192% since June. By late September those contracts made up 24% of all perpetual open interest, up from 6% in January. Centralised exchanges hold 71% of it and decentralised venues 29%. CryptoBriefing on CryptoRank data. Talos, which tracks the same market from the institutional infrastructure side, reported the shift over the year rather than the week: total perpetual open interest fell from about $81 billion to $67 billion while contracts tied to real-world assets rose to $9 billion, about 14% of the total. CryptoBriefing on Talos data.
The institutional version of the trade arrived on 15 October, when Ripple Prime began offering real-world asset perpetual swaps across more than 100 reference markets, with market maker Virtu trading them. Clients deal with one counterparty, the swaps are cross-margined against other asset classes, and Ripple USD can be posted as collateral where jurisdiction allows. CoinSpeaker. Ripple's announcement.
Rules are arriving
Regulators are moving on the same question from different directions. Latvia's economics minister Viktors Valainis said rules for tokenising real-world assets could be in place in the first half of 2027, with commercial property a possible starting point and government bonds on the list, though an assessment due on 1 October is still unfinished. CoinDesk. Brazil's securities regulator argues the other way: CVM president Otto Lobo pressed for mandatory tokenisation combined with artificial intelligence surveillance, to modernize oversight of a fund market the regulator puts at $2.32 trillion, with a tokenisation platform planned at B3 for 2027. Bitcoin.com. The SEC has placed tokenisation on its fiscal 2027 examination priorities, which sets inspection focus and creates no new obligations. NewsBTC. Issuers are pushing back on tokenised stocks under the SEC's September venue exemption: a 23 October notice from OKX-ICE, which operates under it, lists 22 companies, among them Microsoft, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs, that have objected to tokenised versions of their shares trading there. Blockchain Reporter.
What to watch
- How the SEC's 2027 examination priorities are turned into practice.
- Tokenised real-world asset totals at the end of 2026, and whether tokenised stocks keep growing faster in holder count than in value.
- Latvia's assessment, overdue since 1 October, and the Brazilian timetable for mandatory tokenisation before the planned 2027 platform.
