Tokenization Is Easy. Choosing the Asset Isn't.

Five questions to ask before tokenizing anything, and what they mean for anyone launching a tokenization chain.

by Vladislav Dramaliev | Published: 13 November 2026 · 15 min read

Last month in Lugano, at the Future of Capital Markets conference, Adam Lawrence, co-founder and CEO of rwa.xyz, put the value of tokenized assets onchain at $30 to 40 billion. Against global finance, he said, that "effectively rounds to zero".^[1] That matches rwa.xyz's count of distributed assets, tokens that can move between wallets: $39.8 billion on 12 November, leaving out stablecoins. Add represented assets, which never leave the issuer's platform, and it's about $418 billion.^[2]

In October, Broadridge's Distributed Ledger Repo processed $345 billion of repo a day on average.^[3] On a private ledger. That's tokenization at real scale, and no retail investor will ever see it.

For me, that contrast is the whole story. This piece is about the retail side: assets that ordinary investors would hold, trade or borrow against. Institutions tokenize for other reasons, such as faster settlement and moving collateral more cheaply, and that's a different piece. Putting an asset on a blockchain isn't hard anymore. The technology is close to a commodity. The hard part is answering five questions in the right order, starting and ending with your users. Below I look at what's being tokenized today, run it through that test, explain why the perfect tokenized asset doesn't exist, and end with what I'd do if I were launching a tokenization chain.

Most tokenization happens where retail can't see it

Last month, at a blockchain education conference at the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, a speaker from a bank had a whole slide on tokenization. She meant something else entirely: swapping card numbers and customer details for random tokens in the bank's back end, for security. Same word, different world. Here, tokenization means representing an asset (a bond, a fund share, a stock) as a token on a blockchain.

Even then, two things decide what you actually own. The first is legal. Most tokens today are a claim on something held somewhere else. Robinhood's stock tokens, for example, are debt securities issued by a company in Jersey, the offshore financial centre in the Channel Islands. They give you no rights in the underlying shares.^[4] A few countries allow native issuance, where the token itself is the register of ownership. Germany does it with its electronic securities law (eWpG), France with its DEEP regime.

The second is access. rwa.xyz splits tokenized assets into "represented", where the token never leaves the issuing platform, and "distributed", where it can move between wallets.^[5] I'd split distributed once more. A token that only moves between approved, identified wallets is a very different thing from one you can send to anyone.

Most tokenization happens where retail can't reach it. The deepest change is inside market plumbing run by incumbents like DTCC, Broadridge, JPMorgan's Kinexys and the European Central Bank's Pontes. Retail investors feel it last, and only indirectly. I wrote about this in July:

The Biggest Blockchain Story Is the One Crypto Chads Don't SeeTokenization is rebuilding the machinery of global finance. Here is who is doing what, and on which chains.linkedin.com · Vladislav Dramaliev · July 2026

Five questions, in this order

When I look at a tokenization project, I ask five questions, in this order:

1. What do your users want? What do they already do with their assets, and where do they get stuck?
2. What does the law allow? Under which regime, and in which country, is it issued?
3. Who issues it, and what problem does that solve for them?
4. Why a token? What does it do that the ordinary form can't?
5. Who holds it, and what will they actually do with it?

Users come first because they set the goal. The law comes second because it draws the box everything else has to fit in. It decides who may issue, who may buy, how much can be raised and where the token can trade. That doesn't mean you only build what the rules happen to allow. It means you know the box before you design the product, because the rules can quietly kill the business case.

The five questions work as a loop, not a checklist. Questions two to five leave you with a product you can actually build. Then you go back to question one: does it match what your users asked for? If it does, launch it. If it doesn't, go round again, or, if the law is what stands in the way, work to change it.

Answering question one. Listen to two signals. Some users tell you directly: they already do something in DeFi, like borrowing against their crypto, and ask for it inside your wallet. Others never ask, but their behaviour shows the same need: funds moved off the platform, workarounds, features they use elsewhere. Requests tell you what to build. Behaviour tells you how many people actually need it. I come back to how I'd test this at the end. One distinction matters here. Question one is about your platform's customers as a whole. Question five is narrower: who would hold this specific asset, and what the token lets them do with it.

Question two: what does the law allow?

In Europe, this is where it gets hard.

Stablecoins can't pay interest. MiCA, the EU's crypto regulation, bans it in Articles 40 and 50.^[6] A tokenized money-market fund can pay it, because it's a security, not a stablecoin. It looks like a small detail. It decides which products can exist at all.

Securities law is fragmented. Germany, France and Luxembourg disagree on the moment a tokenized security actually changes owner. And a tokenized security is still a security, so raising money from the public with one is capped like any other. A licensed EU crowdfunding platform can raise up to €5 million per company over 12 months.^[7] The new small-offer exemption allows up to €12 million without a full prospectus, and member states can lower that to €5 million.^[8]

There's a fix on the table. Euroclear and Clearstream have proposed an optional EU-wide "28th regime" for tokenized debt securities: one rulebook issuers could opt into, next to the 27 national systems.^[9] It's an idea I like, and one others in the industry have argued for well. I don't doubt the idea. I doubt the politics: 27 national systems, and the registrars and intermediaries built around them, would have to give ground. That two of the biggest incumbents are behind it is a good sign. If I were championing it, I'd map who still stands to lose and bring them in first.

Compliance costs are mostly fixed. This is the point I think gets missed. A prospectus, a licence and legal opinions cost about the same whether you raise €3 million or €300 million. So they hit the smallest issuers hardest. That's awkward, because easier access to capital for small companies is one of the benefits often promised for tokenization, by the OECD among others.^[10] In its proposal to reform the DLT Pilot Regime, the European Commission itself named the compliance burden on smaller firms as one of the main obstacles. It proposed a lighter regime for small operators.^[11] That has yet to materialize: the proposal is still being negotiated.

Questions three and four: who issues, and why a token?

Here's what is onchain today, leaving out stablecoins.^[12]

Each asset class answers "why a token" differently.

• US Treasuries ($14.7B) lead because they're yield-bearing dollar cash that moves around the clock. A tokenized Treasury fund can sit on an exchange as collateral and keep earning interest. Crypto.com, Deribit and Binance have all accepted BlackRock's BUIDL fund that way.^[13]
• Credit ($8.1B) connects real-world borrowers with onchain lenders. A platform raises stablecoins onchain, lends them to a business, passes on the interest and keeps a fee. The yield is real. So is the default risk.
• Commodities ($5.1B) are mostly gold. You can hold a fraction, trade it any time and keep it in your own wallet. You also buy and sell close to the market price, without the dealer markups of physical gold, where even the bar or coin you pick moves the price.
• Active strategies ($4.6B) are tokenized funds whose managers trade actively, hedge-fund style, rather than hold one asset.
• Stocks ($3.7B) promise 24/7 trading and access from outside the US. For me, the bigger use is putting them to work: as collateral, or to earn a yield paid in the same stock.

Now look at the bottom of the chart. Real estate, the asset most people picture when they hear "real-world assets", is $225 million. That's 0.6% of the total.

Tokenized stocks raised another question this year: is the issuer even the company? Under the US Securities and Exchange Commission's "innovation exemption" of 17 September 2026, third parties may tokenize US-listed stocks without the company being involved. The company has 30 days to object.^[14] Not everyone is happy about it.

I understand them. A token with a company's name on it, trading in a thin market, can drift away from the real share price. The company carries the reputational cost without having agreed to anything. Being able to tokenize something doesn't mean you should.

Question five: who holds it?

I see five reasons a retail investor would want a token instead of the asset itself: 24/7 access, use as collateral, yield, open access and, for crypto investors, keeping capital onchain. That last one is crypto-specific: if most of your capital is already onchain, you'd rather buy the asset there than cash out to a bank, wait for the transfer and deposit with a broker. Each one comes with a catch.

The catch that matters most is the simplest. Investors in Europe and the US can already buy Apple or Nvidia in apps like Revolut, Trade Republic or Bitpanda. A token of the same share adds nothing unless it adds utility.

Collateral is the first: borrowing against your stocks or funds without selling them. Kamino, a lending protocol on Solana, started accepting tokenized stocks as collateral in July 2025.^[15]

Yield is the second: holding a stock and getting more of it over time. A vault at IPOR Fusion, where I used to work, does this with tokenized Nvidia on Base. It borrows dollars against the shares, lends them out, and pays the return back in Nvidia.

Nvidia Carry TradeDeposit tokenized Nvidia (NVDAc). The vault borrows USDC against it on Aave, lends it out on Morpho and Aave, and pays the yield in NVDAc. Curated by Tau Labs.app.ipor.io · IPOR Fusion vault on Base

That yield always comes with extra risk. So the real questions are how the risk is managed, whether the return is worth it, and whether anything insures it. Answer those, inside a wallet people already know and trust, and that's the use case I'd build around.

Look at who is building and a pattern shows up.

Retail platforms lead with big US companies, institutional players with funds and Treasuries. European shares are only starting: the London Stock Exchange and Payward, Kraken's parent company, plan to bring London's 100 largest companies onchain as xStocks.^[16]

Europe: shares and solar pass, property struggles

So far, what's onchain is mostly American. Europe is the gap, so here's how questions two to five play out on four European candidates that keep coming up in tokenization pitches. Question one depends on each platform's own users, so it stays out of the table. I've been specific about what exactly gets tokenized, because "tokenizing property" can mean ten different things.

Two results stand out. European shares and indices have the clearest demand, as long as the token does something the share in your app can't. And renewable energy is the most interesting to me. You're not buying shares in a listed solar company, which anyone can already do. You're lending to one specific solar park and getting paid from the power it sells. In April, a tokenized bond of up to €3 million did exactly that for the Ratekau solar park in northern Germany.^[17]

Property is the weak spot, and fixed costs are only part of it. Each country keeps its own land register and property law, so the token usually sits on shares of a company that owns the building, not on the building itself. The price comes from an appraisal, not a market. And when you want out, buyers are few, so sales usually come below value.

The perfect tokenized asset may never exist

So what would the perfect tokenized asset look like? For me, it's natively issued, so the token is the ownership, and you keep it in your own wallet. It moves freely and trades on public decentralized exchanges against stablecoins, crypto and other tokenized assets. It works as collateral, and anyone in the world can get it. And nobody can freeze it, claw it back or declare it invalid.

Tether's CEO Paolo Ardoino made a related point on the Stephan Livera Podcast this month: stop tokenizing Apple shares, tokenize things that produce. His examples ranged from farmland and factories to forests and hydro power.^[18] I agree with the direction. Shares are already digital. Productive real-world assets are where tokenization could open up something new.

Here's how today's assets score against my list. Bitcoin isn't a tokenized asset (it's native to its own chain), but it's the benchmark for what fully onchain looks like.

No real-world asset ticks every box. Bitcoin ticks most of them, but it funds nothing and pays nothing. The tokens that come closest on transferability are open stock tokens like xStocks, and they still aren't native, aren't open to everyone, and have an issuer who can pause them.^[19]

That last column is the real obstacle.

Every real-world asset has someone offchain who has to honour the claim: a custodian, a registrar, a court. That someone can stop the token, and sometimes has to. Paxos froze more than 11,000 PAXG gold tokens tied to FTX on a law-enforcement order.^[20] ERC-3643, a token standard for regulated securities, has freezing and forced transfers built in by design.^[21]

With Bitcoin, code is enough to remove the kill switch, because there's nothing offchain behind it. With a real-world asset, it isn't. Even if the token's contract has no freeze function, the custodian can refuse to redeem it, or the company can declare the transfer void, as Anthropic did this year.^[22] The kill switch just moves offchain.

What can shrink it is law. If the law says the token itself is the legal title, ownership moves with the token and no issuer can cancel it at will. It could only be overridden in a few cases written into law and applied to everyone, like theft, lost keys or a court order. That's the kind of rule a 28th regime could set, and it's why I think it matters.

I'm not sure the perfect tokenized asset can exist at all, at least under regulation as it's usually written. Control is often a requirement, not a bug: regulators want someone who can act on fraud, mistakes, lost keys and sanctioned wallets. So the realistic goal isn't zero control. It's narrow control, written into law, applied to everyone the same way, and visible to the holder before they buy.

If I were launching a tokenization chain

Many brokers and exchanges have launched their own chains, most often Ethereum layer 2s. They all need the same basics: a stablecoin that can be issued and redeemed natively on the chain, a secure bridge for value to flow in, partners with real products, and incentives to get started. Those are prerequisites, not a strategy. Everyone has them, so to a user the chains look identical. If I were launching tokenization at a regulated European broker with its own chain, I'd start from three hypotheses about what could make it different.

• Identity checks once, then everywhere. KYC done in the app carries over to the user's own non-custodial wallet. Then whitelisted assets stop being a dead end, and regulated DeFi becomes possible.
• Collateral from day one. Let people borrow against what they already hold, crypto first and then tokenized stocks and funds.
• European assets as the opening. This holds for a platform whose customers are mainly European. Users have to want it, so I'd test it rather than assume it. But tokenized European shares and indices that work as collateral, and ideally earn a yield, would give European savers a new reason to hold European companies. That fits the EU's own push to keep savings invested in Europe, the Savings and Investments Union.^[23] Energy projects could follow.

Behind all three sits distribution. Robinhood and Kraken already have it, and any broker with millions of customers does. The question is whether those customers would start using the platform's self-custody wallet too, what would make them do it, and whether they'd recommend it to friends. That's what the three hypotheses are for. A large retail base and bank partners matter more than yet another issuance platform.

Who launches with you. Ideally, a working DeFi ecosystem from day one, not "coming soon". For me the foundations are five. A euro stablecoin, ideally issued natively on the chain; bridged in works too, just less cleanly. A bridge to bring other assets on. For a broker, the best bridge may be its own app: let users move selected assets from the app to their self-custody wallet, and liquidity arrives on day one. A DEX with real liquidity. A lending market on an established platform with a long track record, such as Aave, Morpho or Compound, where the chain's assets work as collateral. And oracles that price all of it. On top of that you need an issuer with a real asset. Vaults come next: strategies built on those markets, like the Nvidia vault above. Perpetuals and prediction markets are extras, not foundations. At æternity I saw what happens when the story launches ahead of the partners and the liquidity. You spend attention you can't buy back.

One flagship action, measured. Not "the chain is live". Pick one thing every user can do in the wallet on day one, like "borrow euros against your bitcoin" or "earn on a euro Treasury fund". It makes the launch easy to explain, and it gives you the measure: how many users did it, and how many still do it 90 days later. I'd set those targets before launch and judge the launch on them, not on week-one deposits.

A token with one clear job. Many chains also launch their own token, though broker-run chains like Robinhood's haven't so far. If you do, it can be your best asset or your biggest liability. At IPOR Labs, our token launch came with a liquidity mining campaign. Deposits went from $2.4 million to almost $43 million in about two months. Many of the people who came bought the token only to stake it, farmed the rewards, sold and left. I called them locusts. The industry calls it mercenary capital. Plasma, a Tether-linked chain, showed the same thing at scale in 2025. Token rewards pulled $6.6 billion into Aave's Plasma market within weeks of launch. Then deposits fell to about $1.7 billion.^[24] It's one of many. Incentivized launches look like a huge success for exactly as long as the rewards last.

Give capital a reason to stay. We did it differently at IPOR with Fusion, our later vault product, and deposits grew from $7 million to $67 million. There was a points programme, but I think it mattered least. The yield itself, transparency, trust in the curators running the vaults and a simpler interface did more. If you do pay incentives, reward capital that stays for three, six or twelve months. How much stays matters more than how much arrives.

How I would test it. These are hypotheses, not answers, so this is question one in practice. I'd run short interviews about what people actually do with their holdings today, and invite-only pilots before the public launch. I'd also listen to what bank partners keep asking for in business-development conversations, and to what the community complains about. When those point the same way, you have your launch.

The edge is what others don't do

Tokenization is easy. Choosing the asset isn't. For anyone launching a tokenization chain, what the others already do is only the starting line. The real work is finding what they don't do. Questions two to five tell you what's possible. Question one, asked again at the end, tells you what's worth building. Then commit to it, and use it to win new users and keep the ones you already have.

The perfect tokenized asset is a direction, not the goal. Productive, native, freely tradable, useful as collateral and impossible to switch off: nothing ticks every box today, and some boxes may never be ticked. The chains I'd bet on are the ones that keep moving towards it, one differentiated step at a time.