Why Is Tokenization Not a Crypto Trend?

Tokenization is not a crypto trend; it is a capital-markets infrastructure upgrade of the kind that recurs every few decades. It changes how assets are recorded, transferred, and administered, not what they are; a tokenized bond is still a bond. The clearest evidence is not market size but behaviour: the firms and regulators building the rails are the ones that already define how global markets function.

Every significant shift in financial infrastructure looks like speculation to those not paying attention to it. The framing of trend versus revolution is the wrong question. The right one is the same asked of every infrastructure upgrade: does it reduce friction, widen access, and make markets work better? When the answer is yes, adoption follows, and only the timing is uncertain.

Haven't we seen this pattern before?

In 1963, the Italian motorway company Autostrade issued the first Eurobond, a $15 million fifteen-year loan split into 60,000 bearer bonds of $250 each, arranged by the London bank S. G. Warburg and listed in Luxembourg (Euroclear, financial-history record). Settlement relied on couriers physically carrying paper certificates between banks. Critics called it a curiosity. Within two decades the Eurobond market had reshaped how governments and corporations raised capital across borders.

The friction was not a feature; it was simply what existed before someone built something better. In December 1968, the Brussels office of Morgan Guaranty Trust, a predecessor of today's JPMorgan, founded the Euroclear system to settle those bonds electronically instead of by physical delivery (Euroclear, corporate history). Costs fell, confidence rose, and the market opened to far more participants. Nobody called it a trend. It became standard because it was better. Tokenization is that same move applied to private markets: it does not change what an asset is, only how it is recorded, transferred, and administered.

What is the difference between tokenization and cryptocurrency?

They share a technology layer and almost nothing else. A cryptocurrency is a speculative asset whose price is driven by supply mechanics and sentiment; it has no underlying cash flow and no physical backing. Tokenization is the application of that same blockchain plumbing to existing, real assets. A tokenized government bond is still a government bond. A tokenized real-estate interest is still backed by a building generating rent. A tokenized money-market fund is still a money-market fund. The token is the administrative layer, not the asset.

The regulatory architecture already reflects the distinction. In the EU, the MiCA regulation governs crypto-assets, while tokenized investment instruments fall under the Prospectus Regulation, MiFID II, and national securities law. These are different regimes because they cover fundamentally different things. When a bank tokenizes a money-market fund, it is not entering the crypto market; it is applying blockchain to a regulated, audited product to make it more efficient. The analogy is banking's move from paper ledgers to electronic records in the 1970s and 80s: no one said banks had entered the computing industry.

Who is actually building in tokenization in 2026?

This is where the trend framing collapses. The tokenized real-world-asset market is small in absolute terms, around $30 billion and change in mid-2026 (RWA.xyz), but the builders are the institutions that define global capital markets, and they do not build clearing infrastructure on fashions.

BlackRock's tokenized money-market fund, BUIDL, launched in March 2024 with Securitize and held roughly $2.5 billion in assets by May 2026, one of the two largest tokenized-Treasury products tracked by RWA.xyz (RWA.xyz; BlackRock/Securitize, 2026). JPMorgan's blockchain unit, Kinexys, rebranded from Onyx in late 2024, reported cumulative transaction volume above $3 trillion and average daily volume above $5 billion by December 2025, and rolled out a bank deposit token, JPMD, that November (J.P. Morgan / Kinexys, 2025). Franklin Templeton's FOBXX, represented by the BENJI token, launched in 2021 as the first US-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain as its system of record, later expanding across several chains (Franklin Templeton; Stellar Development Foundation, 2021 onward). Each required years of legal, regulatory, and technical groundwork. That is the behaviour of firms making infrastructure decisions, not speculative bets.

What do the forecasts say, and how much should we trust them?

The forecasts are large and, importantly, they disagree, which is itself informative. Boston Consulting Group and ADDX projected in 2022 that tokenized assets could reach about $16.1 trillion by 2030, a fiftyfold rise from roughly $310 billion in 2022, with tokenized real estate the single largest slice at around $5 trillion (BCG / ADDX, 2022). McKinsey, in June 2024, was far more conservative: a base case of about $2 trillion in tokenized market capitalisation by 2030 (excluding cryptocurrencies and stablecoins), within a plausible range of roughly $1 trillion to $4 trillion (McKinsey, 2024).

That is an order-of-magnitude spread, and it should be read honestly: the direction is agreed, the pace is genuinely contested. An institutional reader should treat any single headline number, including the largest, as a scenario, not a fact. What both camps share is the expectation that tokenization scales from here, not that it fades.

What is the regulatory signal most people are missing?

Regulators do not write frameworks for passing trends; they write them for things that will be around long enough to need rules. In the United States, the GENIUS Act, the first major federal crypto statute, was signed into law on 18 July 2025, creating a licensing regime for payment stablecoins and carving them out of securities law; SEC Chair Paul Atkins publicly welcomed it and asked staff to consider how registrants might use payment stablecoins for settlement (SEC.gov, July 2025). In the EU, MiCA is operational alongside MiFID II and the Prospectus Regulation, with the AMF issuing positions on tokenized instruments. And in Hong Kong, the Monetary Authority's Project Ensemble moved from sandbox to live, real-value settlement, the EnsembleTX pilot, in November 2025, with participants including HSBC, Standard Chartered, BlackRock, and Franklin Templeton, running through 2026 (HKMA, November 2025).

When a central bank builds settlement infrastructure for tokenized deposits, it is not making a bet on cryptocurrency; it is making a decision about financial plumbing. That is the only sensible way to read it.

Why does real estate lead the forecasts?

Of the asset classes tokenization can address, real estate is at once the largest opportunity and the most structurally broken market, which is why it tops most projections (real estate is the biggest slice of BCG's 2030 estimate). The logic is structural, not sentimental: property is simultaneously the least liquid, most opaque, most administratively burdensome, and least accessible of the major asset classes. Public equities were not the priority because they already have price discovery and liquidity; institutional private equity already had workable solutions for large investors. Real estate has neither at scale. The size of the opportunity is proportional to the depth of the problem, and real estate has the deepest problem.

The bottom line

Every major capital-markets infrastructure upgrade of the past sixty years (the Eurobond market, electronic clearing, electronic trading, internet banking) was first dismissed as niche or premature, then became standard because lower friction wins when the underlying system is sound. Tokenization fits the pattern: it does not change what assets are, only how they are administered, transferred, and accessed. Reduced friction widens markets, and wider markets compound. The institutions and regulators that understand this are already building and already writing the rules. In 2026 the open question is not whether the transition is real, but which assets, structures, and platforms will define it.

This article is part of DeReal's research series on real-estate access, liquidity, and tokenization. It is analysis of the market, not investment advice or an offer of any kind.

Sources

• Euroclear, Understanding Eurobonds (financial history): Autostrade 1963, Euroclear 1968.

• RWA.xyz: tokenized real-world-asset market and BUIDL (Treasuries view).

• J.P. Morgan, Kinexys (About / volumes).

• Franklin Templeton / Stellar Development Foundation, FOBXX and BENJI (2021).

• BCG and ADDX (2022), Relevance of On-chain Asset Tokenization: $16.1T by 2030.

• McKinsey (2024), From ripples to waves: ~$2T by 2030 base case.

• SEC.gov, Chair Atkins statement on the GENIUS Act (July 2025); GENIUS Act (overview).

• HKMA, Project Ensemble next phase (Nov 2025).