For years, tokenization was where good ideas went to die. Hundreds of projects promised to change the financial world forever, by putting real estate, stocks, and commodities on different blockchains. But by 2021, over 90% had failed to achieve meaningful trading volume, with many industry insiders writing post-mortems, and investors moving on. The experiment, it seemed, was over.
Then, something strange started to happen. While everyone turned their heads to Capitol Hill in the hopes of regulations clearing, tokenized RWAs grew from $5 billion to $24 billion in just two years. It seemed that the years of failed experiments didn’t stop the idea – but refined it instead.
Some argue this is only the beginning. While most RWAs today see limited transaction volume, their long-term implications could be transformative. As assets from real estate to commodities and intellectual property move onchain, we may edge closer to a system where value is swapped directly for value, a modern form of digital bartering. In such a world, dollar-denominated settlements in global trade could diminish, especially as AI-driven financial coordination accelerates.
Last month, in July 2025, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group acquired a ¥100 billion office tower in Osaka. The bank’s plan was unusual: convert the entire 30-story building into onchain tokens. Soon, retail investors will be able to buy fractional ownership, with institutional allocations handled via Japan’s digital securities rails (Progmat/STs). Every transaction will settle in seconds, and every ownership transfer will carry full legal weight under Japan’s security-token framework.
What happened in Osaka represents one of largest single-asset tokenizations in history. At the same time, this news headline led to many people looking into RWAs again – and discovering their quiet, but explosive growth. RWA tokenization expanded from $5B (2022) to ~$24B (June 2025), a ~380% surge, outpaced only by stablecoins. And the growth doesn’t stop there – Boston Consulting Group projects $16T market by 2030; while Standard Chartered projects $30.1T by 2034. Even a fraction of these numbers would reshape how value moves through the global economy.
Projection of RWAs growth
Source: onchain.org
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Early Real-World Asset Tokenization Lessons in Crypto
The St. Regis Aspen resort was one of the first examples of tokenizing real estate. In 2018, the luxury hotel sold $18M of tokens to accredited investors. The tokens then closed at $1.32 on their first trading day (up 32% from the $1.00 offering price). Yet, the liquidity dwindled quickly – by 2020 the tokenized-real-estate market saw anemic volumes.
The concept made sense, the execution didn’t. Aspen buyers owned shares in an intermediate entity, not the property directly, with stacked SPV structures, extra fees, and unclear rights.
Next was Harbor’s $20M student-housing tokenization, which secured approvals but struggled to find sustained investor demand. The Hub consisted of a premier off-campus and student housing at the University of South Carolina. Equity in the property was divided into 955 shares (as tokens) priced at $21,000 each. However, the project failed after the lender blocked it, due to legal conflicts with mortgage terms.
By 2021, observers noted that <10% of tokenized real-estate projects showed meaningful secondary trading. Three failures defined the first wave: (1) legal non-recognition of tokenized title, (2) tiny accredited-only investor pools with $10k+ minimums, and (3) no market-maker/liquidity infrastructure. By 2022, it was clear – in order for tokenization to survive and for the market to attract more novel use cases, these foundations would have to be fixed.
Building The Missing Crypto Infrastructure
Dubai addressed core problems first, proposing a direct property tokenization model with improved legal recognition. The Dubai Land Department launched Prypco Mint in May 2025 – minimums started at AED 2,000 (~$540), with token transfers synced directly to government land records. The agency itself projects tokenized real estate could reach AED 60B (~$16B), about 7% of all transactions, by 2033. Early offerings sold out rapidly.
Behind the scenes, Japan followed with clear security-token rules: since 2021, the country has recorded dozens of tokenized real-estate and bond issues under its ST regime, paving the way for MUFG’s ¥100B tower.
Technical rails needed to adapt in parallel in order to allow the masses to participate in more tokenization events. Chainlink launched real-time Data Streams for U.S. equities/ETFs across 37 blockchains, which was critical for pricing tokenized stocks/bonds onchain. Then, Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon launched tokenized money-market fund shares on a private chain, covering funds from managers like BlackRock and Fidelity – a key bridge for a $7T asset class.
Most importantly, tokenized assets found buyers in DeFi. MakerDAO has at times held >$1B in real-world assets backing DAI, with RWAs contributing the majority of revenue. Ondo Finance attracted ~$650M AUM and ~15,000 holders in USDY (as of mid-2025), making tokenized T-bill yield accessible outside the US. Composability solved the early liquidity problem: tokens could serve as collateral, move across venues, and generate yield.
The Bigger Crypto Pattern in RWA Tokenization
Larry Fink was right when he declared tokenization “the next generation for markets” in 2022. But the shift over the past few years looks different than how most expected. Rather than disrupting traditional finance through confrontation, tokenization is being absorbed and deployed by incumbents themselves.
When MUFG tokenizes a $681 million building, when Goldman creates blockchain-based money market funds, when BlackRock engineers MakerDAO’s Treasury investments, they’ve acknowledged something that has been hiding in plain sight. The current system, with its settlement delays, access restrictions, and operational friction, has become competitively disadvantaged.
The objections that stopped earlier attempts are now dissolving. The SEC’s Project Crypto explicitly aims to facilitate tokenized securities trading on decentralized platforms. Major custodians like BNY Mellon are managing tokenized funds, giving institutional blessing to the concept. The infrastructure now handles everything from compliance to price discovery to secondary trading.
Yet perhaps the most significant shift is competitive pressure. Every asset that remains exclusively offchain becomes less liquid, less accessible, and more expensive to trade relative to tokenized alternatives. Financial institutions that resist tokenization risk watching their assets and services become obsolete.
Stocks, bonds, and real estate were just the beginning. Even more interesting use cases will be happening at the edges – as more variety of assets is brought into the onchain world. One example worth highlighting is Project Mocha, who are building on Scroll – a blockchain that I co-founded, which tokenizes individual coffee trees in Kenya. Their model allows coffee lovers to directly invest in coffee trees, funding farmers who need upfront capital to allocate for faster farm growth, whilst also getting a share of the revenue. Similar approaches are emerging for solar farms sharing energy revenue, cargo containers generating shipping fees, and even music royalties flowing directly to fans.
Today’s $24 billion in tokenized assets represents less than 0.01% of global wealth. The surface has barely been scratched. But the trajectory points clearly toward a future where every asset (whether it is stocks or real estate) exists natively onchain. The question facing every financial institution, every asset manager, every investor, is simple: How quickly can you adapt to a world where everything is tokenized?
Because ready or not, that world is arriving.