Platforms · Software · Providers · Markets
Tokenised real-world assets are attracting holders without generating comparable secondary-market activity, according to figures from Pantera Capital and the IMF. Pantera Capital's September 2026 report examined 671 assets worth $331.8 billion. Permissioned products make up 59% of market capitalisation but contribute only 0.2% of spot turnover. Open-access tokens account for 41% of market value and almost all spot trading, at 99.8%.
The contrast is visible in individual funds. BlackRock's BUIDL holds $2.77 billion across 10 chains and has 106 investors, but registered 191 transfers in a single month. Franklin Templeton's BENJI had 562 holders and no monthly transfer volume. For engineers and operations teams, those figures point to a distinction between balances recorded on-chain and assets that can be moved or traded routinely.
What the liquidity evidence changes
The figures challenge the use of holder growth or issued value as a proxy for market depth. BUIDL turns over 0.12 times, while stablecoins rotate roughly 21 times their float each month.
That creates a 180-fold gap in activity. The IMF's October 2026 Global Financial Stability Report also characterised tokenized markets as small, fragmented and relatively illiquid, with volatility roughly 1.5 times that of traditional counterparts.
Trading is not absent across the category. Tokenised gold provides a contrast: PAXG and XAUT together produced $90.7 billion in Q1 2026 spot volume, exceeding the $84.64 billion recorded over the whole of 2025.
Their average monthly spot volumes were $5.72 billion and $5.32 billion respectively. The source attributes gold's stronger turnover to broad appeal and market-maker interest, while describing treasuries as products commonly held rather than traded.
That difference matters for interpreting growth in other segments. Tokenized stocks reached 204.6% monthly turnover in June, while rate products recorded 0.1%.
Treasuries expanded from $13 billion to $16.5 billion between Q1 and Q2 2026, and private credit rose from $4.1 billion to $5.1 billion, but both remained low-turnover categories. The article's central point is that product type, not simply the underlying chain, shapes the liquidity profile.
Which products the findings cover
The data spans permissioned and open-access tokens, stock products, rate products, treasuries, private credit and gold. It does not announce a new rule, platform change or migration deadline. Pantera's Tokenization Preparedness Index scored the sample 2.04; the article says most products remain wrappers rather than assets designed to operate natively on-chain.
Holder counts are rising quickly too. BNB Chain's RWA addresses reached 2,032,387 in early October 2026, a 15.56% increase over 30 days. Across chains, tokenized stockholders numbered 4.3 million by late September, 43 times the count a year earlier. BNB Chain represented 39% of those on-chain RWA holders. Yet just 29 of 110 major products, each with a market cap above $10 million, met basic liquidity and distribution thresholds. More than half of the analysed market had no meaningful secondary trading.
As Finance Magnates reported, June trading in tokenised stock perpetual futures on platforms such as Hyperliquid totalled $67.8 billion. The spot market for the underlying tokens was one-sixteenth that size. The article says traders use derivatives for use, shorting and concentrated market-making. The IMF data also indicates that more than 50% of tokenized equity trading takes place outside traditional market hours, while roughly 80% of analysed trades involved less than one share.
The article expects the market to look different within two to three years, with open-access tokens taking more trading activity, RWAs used more routinely as DeFi collateral, and venues linking centralised order books with on-chain pools. It points to Morpho, where private credit leads utilisation, as an existing example of collateral use. Those are expectations, not announced delivery dates or requirements.
What this means on the desk
For a trading or operations team, issuance and distribution figures do not establish whether a product can support regular execution. The reported split makes it worth checking how transfer permissions, venue access and secondary-market activity interact for each asset. What volumes can be reconciled against actual transfers, and what restrictions affect moving tokens between venues or holders?
Before treating a rising holder count as evidence of usable liquidity, teams can ask where executable depth comes from and whether activity sits in spot markets or derivatives. The article gives no operational cost, latency or reconciliation figures, and it names no integration deadline. Those remain questions for providers: what market-making and settlement arrangements support the product, and how are transfers and trades reported across its venues?
