Tokenized assets: the money sits in Treasuries and credit, the users sit in stocks
By value, tokenization is an institutional cash market. By wallet count, it is a retail stock market. What the October data says about that split.
RWA & TOKENIZATIONETFS & INSTITUTIONSANALYSIS
Sofia Marchetti
10/28/20263 min read
Measure tokenized real-world assets by dollar value and you see a market built for institutions: Treasury funds, private credit pools and gold. Measure the same market by wallet count and you see something else entirely, a retail market for shares. That split sharpened through the summer and autumn of 2026, and it is the most useful thing the latest data tells us about where tokenization is heading.
Start with value. RWA.xyz figures put the on-chain value of tokenized assets, excluding stablecoins, at roughly $39 billion in late October, while broader counts that include assets represented on additional platforms reach about $46 billion. A CoinPaprika review of the data published on October 26 attributes more than $15 billion of that to tokenized US Treasury products and more than $5 billion to tokenized gold and other commodities. Stobox Research, using a wider definition that counts active loan books, argued in September that private credit has overtaken Treasuries as the largest non-stablecoin segment.
Where the holders are
Now count people. Tokenized stock holders reached about 5.3 million addresses in October, roughly 83% of all RWA holders, according to figures reported by TokenPost on October 27. Across every tokenized asset class, holder addresses climbed from about 1.4 million in June to 6.4 million in October. In four months, stocks went from just over a third of holders to the overwhelming majority.
That growth is highly concentrated. Robinhood accounts for about 24% of holder addresses and Binance's bStocks for about 23%, with xStocks adding roughly another million. Together the three providers cover close to two thirds of all addresses. This is distribution rather than organic on-chain discovery: large platforms with existing customer bases switched on a product, and their users appeared in the data.
Why the two maps diverge
The explanation is ticket size and purpose. A tokenized money market fund such as BlackRock's BUIDL, which held about $2.8 billion at the end of August according to on-chain trackers, has high minimums and works as a cash-management tool for crypto firms, funds and trading desks. A few hundred holders can account for billions of dollars. Tokenized equities are the reverse: small balances, many wallets, and a use case that suits retail, namely exposure to US shares for people outside the US brokerage system, often outside normal market hours.
The divergence matters for anyone reading headlines. A rising holder count shows that distribution works; it says little about how much capital has actually moved on-chain, and tokenized equity value remains a small fraction of the Treasury and credit totals. Equally, multi-billion-dollar fund figures show that institutions are comfortable holding cash in tokenized wrappers, not that those tokens circulate.
The idle-value problem
The weakest part of the picture is usage. Stobox estimated that loans outstanding against tokenized RWA collateral across major DeFi protocols were well below $2 billion as of July, a thin slice of the asset base. Most tokenized Treasury and credit positions are held, not traded or pledged. Flows are positive but modest: issuer-level tracking cited by CoinPaprika showed more than $1 billion of net new money over the 30 days to early October, while a cross-chain measure excluding stablecoins put the figure nearer $541 million.
Concentration is the other structural risk. BUIDL and a few rival Treasury funds hold a large share of their segment, and three distributors dominate stock tokens. A product problem, a regulatory decision about a single issuer or a change in one platform's terms could move the aggregate numbers sharply in either direction.
What to watch
Three indicators will show whether the two halves of the market start to meet. The first is collateral use: if exchanges and lending protocols accept tokenized Treasuries as margin at scale, value will start to move rather than sit. The second is equity value per holder; if it rises, retail users are doing more than testing a new feature. The third is interest rates. Tokenized Treasury funds grew in a period of high short-term yields, and further Federal Reserve cuts would narrow their advantage over plain stablecoins and test how sticky that capital really is.
For now, tokenization serves two constituencies with different needs. Institutions want yield-bearing cash and faster settlement; retail users want access to assets they could not easily buy before. The platforms that connect the two, letting stock-token holders park idle balances in tokenized cash and letting fund tokens work as collateral for trading, are the most likely source of the next phase of growth.