5 minBusiness
Tokenization Surges Past $34 Billion as Onchain Investors Reshape Trading
A new Dune report finds tokenized real-world assets have topped $34 billion, with tokenized stocks up more than 2,000% as onchain investors favor individual equities and private credit over traditional packaged products.
Tokenization is no longer just a way to put familiar financial products on a blockchain. According to a new report from data analytics platform Dune, onchain investors are building an around-the-clock financial system that operates on fundamentally different rules than traditional markets, and the total supply of tokenized real-world assets has now surpassed $34 billion in 2026.
Major categories including cash equivalents and commodities have more than doubled over the past year, while tokenized stocks have grown fastest of all, rising more than 2,000% as the number of active holders blew past one million. The findings suggest that the rapid institutional adoption of blockchain-based assets is producing new investing behaviors rather than simply replicating legacy products on a digital ledger.
«The way the market is wired is completely different,» Dune CEO Frederik Haga said. «The whole underlying architecture of these venues is different, and so that creates different trading behavior.»
The divergence is most visible in equities. On Wall Street, passive index-wide investing dominates, with more than 6,000 U.S.-listed exchange-traded funds now outnumbering individual stocks. Onchain, however, users prefer individual companies. Dune estimates that individual stocks account for 81% of tokenized equities held in spot markets, and the value of those holdings grew ninefold over the past year, outpacing tokenized funds and ETFs.
«While a lot of the world’s financial system today has become indices and packaged products, when people trade on the blockchain, it’s to express themselves more, as opposed to passive investing,» Haga said.
The split carries over into lending. In traditional finance, U.S. Treasuries are the standard backing for loans because they are considered safe and easy to value. On crypto lending platforms, investors more often deposit tokenized private credit, or loans to businesses that can offer higher returns. Dune found that credit assets make up about three-quarters of all real-world assets deposited in decentralized lending, while only a tiny fraction of tokenized Treasuries is used the same way.
Yield is one reason. Tokenized private credit can allow investors to earn interest on their holdings while using those same assets as collateral to borrow and fund other trades, according to Haga.
The report arrives amid a wave of institutional activity. Asset managers including Franklin Templeton and BlackRock have created tokenized government money-market and Treasury funds. Companies such as Robinhood and Ondo Finance have brought onchain versions of stocks and exchange-traded funds to investors outside the United States. Earlier this month, Nasdaq announced a $100 investment in Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, to continue building out tokenized stocks. The Securities and Exchange Commission has also opened a limited path for compliant U.S. venues to test blockchain-based equity trading.
What began as a niche effort to represent real estate, bonds, and equities as digital tokens has quickly gained momentum on Wall Street. But the Dune data indicates that the market’s underlying architecture is steering investors toward different choices than the traditional system would predict. Rather than concentrating on broad index exposure, onchain participants are focusing on individual stocks, trading equities around the clock, and using private credit tokens in decentralized lending.
The result is a parallel market structure that defies the design of traditional exchanges and could influence how both retail and institutional investors approach asset allocation in the years ahead. For now, the numbers point to a market that is growing quickly and developing its own distinct habits, even as regulators and major financial firms move to accommodate it.
2
