If something has value, it’s likely that it has already been tokenized. The digital asset industry has spent a decade proving that real-world assets can live onchain, and has tokenized everything from bonds to whiskey barrels, private credit to US treasuries, real estate, and beyond.
Unfortunately, most of that value remains trapped within closed networks, essentially invisible to those who could actually use it. For real-world assets to properly function as financial assets, distribution is required. Otherwise, tokenized instruments are just museum artifacts on display for public admiration.
Getting valuable assets onchain has been a huge milestone for the industry. SPICE VC was the first regulated offering onchain back in 2017, and since then the list of “world firsts” has piled up. The total value of real-world assets recorded onchain grew from roughly $25.4 billion at the start of 2026 to more than $36 billion within the first five months of the year. If we include federated and private chains, the number is much, much higher.
An asset isn’t useful if it can’t move
The technology is leading to increased adoption (which means it obviously works), but getting an asset onchain is the start of a much longer journey. Asset tokenization is the entry point into the onchain economy, and we’re seeing broad strokes being made across every asset class by players of all sizes. The harder problem, however, which the industry hasn’t yet solved, is distribution. If an asset can’t move, be composed into other financial products or in new and innovative ways, or reach a global base of users, then what’s been built is not a true financial instrument for the modern global economy. It sits there, provably real and provably onchain, but largely useless to anyone outside the network that minted it.
A true financial instrument needs to be usable. As such, it must be liquid enough to trade when someone wants out and composable enough to be built into financial primitives without a team of engineers negotiating a one-off integration. For traditional capital to trust it, it should be transparent through verification of onchain proof of reserves. A yield-bearing stablecoin backed by an SEC-registered instrument, or a vault token drawing on a pool of prime HELOCs, can only clear that bar if it composes like every other onchain asset. While tokenization solved the representation problem, it now needs to push forward and address its major problem of usability, composability, and sovereignty.
Scale alone doesn’t create a market
The sheer volume of asset tokenization proves how seriously the industry takes it. But a large share of the value is sitting inactive onchain. These inactive RWAs are minted and custodied, but never actually traded or composed into anything else. As of August 2026, tokenized treasuries, the single largest category, account for more than $16 billion, while private credit sits just under $7.3 billion. Both are concentrated among a small number of issuers, with each primarily running on its own closed rails. If these assets can’t be verified or moved freely, there is no reason for institutional capital to take notice.
Distribution requires design
A closed network doesn’t automatically open up when it reaches a certain size. An asset that is unable to move outside the walls of its native platform is just as stuck when there’s a billion dollars sitting next to it as it was when there was a hundred. People can get distracted by large numbers, which leads to scale being able to mask the real problem. Realistically, a large enough closed network can look like a market from the outside. However, the gap shows up when someone tries to actually move the large amount of capital inside.
Distribution is its own, separate layer, and it has to be built on and with purpose. It doesn’t just emerge as a byproduct of enough tokenization happening elsewhere. Usability, transparency, historicity, and immutability have to be designed in from the start, down to the level of individual line items. Both traditional finance and the broader crypto industry need to be able to look at the thousands of tokenized loans and see, asset by asset, what backs a vault, for example. If what’s behind a vault is invisible, opaque, or otherwise unclear, institutional capital won’t touch it because they can’t trust that it won’t cost them big down the line.
The next phase is making RWAs usable
The industry proved that real-world assets can live onchain. Now, we need to show that those tokenized assets can actually behave like financial assets. This is the work that decides whether the RWA era has begun, or whether we’re just curators of a well-documented museum.
Collin Sellers, VP of Solutions at NUVA Labs
Collin Sellers is VP of Solutions at Nuva Labs (formerly Provenance Blockchain Labs), which co-created NUVA, the chain-agnostic marketplace bringing institutional-grade real-world assets to DeFi. Collin has spent his career at the frontier of tokenization, contributing to several “world firsts” in bringing real-world assets onchain, including the first digitally-native HEI contract, the first fully digitally-native life insurance contract, first comic book ownership rights, first Kentucky racehorse ownership rights, and the first conversion of traditional-to-digital equity to be traded on a digital ATS.
