Tokenisation in 2026

For most of crypto’s history, “real-world assets” (RWAs) have been a promise: bring the 100s of trillions of dollars of traditional finance on-chain, and you get faster settlement, broader access, and programmable money markets. In 2026, that promise is finally turning into products.

The sequence:

1. Stablecoins proved product–market fit ($300Bn on-chain dollars growing rapidly).
2. The next step: put the assets those dollars buy (T-bills, funds, metals, equities) on the same rails.
3. Once assets are on-chain, they become transferable 24/7, instantly settleable, and programmable as collateral.

That’s why tokenisation will become one of the most important quiet compounding themes for 2026.

Tokenised asset market cap growth

Davos: Fink and Armstrong are describing the same end-state

With BlackRock's Larry Fink proclaiming at Davos 2026 that "tokenization is inevitable" and advocating for a unified blockchain to accelerate its adoption, the stage is set for tokenisation to become a dominant trend this year.

Fink has been explicit that finance is at “the beginning of the tokenization of all assets,” framing tokenisation as a structural shift rather than a crypto side-quest.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is pushing from the other side of the stack. Coming out of Davos, he emphasized stablecoins as foundational “plumbing” and pointed to tokenisation expanding from US Dollars into stocks, real estate, funds and more, with the potential to widen access globally. Crypto is not just banking the unbanked but, brokering the unbrokered too, anyone anywhere with a smart phone can purchase a fraction of a TSLA or NVDA share or gold or silver.

Different incentives, same destination: on-chain capital markets.

What tokenisation actually is

Tokenisation is not “making stocks into JPEGs.” It’s a legal + operational wrapper that lets an asset be represented and transferred as a token:

• Legal claim + custody (who owns what, where it sits, how redemption works)
• Compliance layer (KYC/AML, transfer restrictions where required)
• Blockchain rails (24/7 transfer, near-instant settlement, programmability)

The blockchain doesn’t replace the law; it replaces a lot of the friction. Like ETFs for funds, it is just a more efficient wrapper.

Why 2026 is the inflection

1) On-chain “cash and carry” is scaling

RWAs ex-stablecoins have grown sharply since end-2024, and tokenised Treasuries are emerging as the wedge product (cash wants yield, on-chain).

2) Regulation is moving quickly

WEF’s own 2026 outlook explicitly calls out improved regulatory clarity as an adoption accelerant and points to the proposed U.S. CLARITY Act as part of that market-structure push.  Trump at Davos "Congress is working very hard on crypto market structure legislation, which I hope to sign very soon." 

The Clarity Act is scheduled for a senate vote later this week, having passed the House with strong bi-partisan could be signed into law very soon, and could be the catalyst the whole market needs to move on from a disappointing 2025.

Metals are already tokenised (more product market fit)

Gold is the cleanest early case: it’s globally recognised collateral with real-world frictions (storage, transport, market hours). Tokenisation turns it into a digitally transferable bearer-like instrument that can also be used inside crypto collateral frameworks. 

The tokenised commodity market cap is around $5.5Bn, $4.9Bn of that is gold, but other precious metals are growing quickly this year.

Tokenised equities: the “xStocks” beta test

Equities are the pinnacle of the tokenisation trend because they’re the biggest pool of value and the most operationally constrained. The experimentation is already happening: products like xStocks are essentially a beta test for what equity ownership looks like when it becomes composable and 24/7 transferable.

Even if the first wave is jurisdiction-limited and structurally imperfect, it’s hard to unsee the direction once markets taste always-on settlement.

How to invest in the theme 

1) Own the rails (settlement layers + infrastructure)

As more assets settle on public blockchains, the toll roads are:

• high-throughput settlement layers,
• interoperability/messaging,
• oracle/attestation layers,
• custody/compliance middleware.

This is the “picks-and-shovels” allocation: you don’t need to perfectly pick which issuer wins—just that the pie grows.

2) Own the issuers/platforms tokenising real assets:

Ondo

If you want a single-name, crypto-native platform levered to the RWA trend, Ondo is a good example to discuss.

• Ondo’s OUSG product provides exposure to short-term U.S. Treasuries / money-market style holdings with 24/7 mint/redemption (for eligible investors).
• Ondo also has USDY, described as a tokenised yield product backed by short-term Treasuries and bank deposits (structure matters here—read the docs and restrictions).
• The ONDO token is explicitly positioned as a governance token for the Ondo DAO / Flux Finance, with a fixed initial supply stated in Ondo’s docs.  

At Merkle Tree we prefer to take bigger positions in the picks and shovels, infrastructure, protocols suffer a lots of volatility and some have limited moats.  The blockchains, however, have network effects and different pros and cons in terms of speed, cost and security, I did a deeper dive in to Solana a few months ago that unpacks some of this.