The number people keep quoting is $17B. That's what the RWA.xyz tracker showed for on-chain real-world assets a few weeks ago, tokenized treasuries, private credit, commodities, and a thin slice of equities. Compared to the $4B figure I was citing when I joined a panel on this at TOKEN2049 Singapore in 2023, the chart looks like vindication. Compared to the $400T global asset universe it's supposed to be eating, it looks like a rounding error.
Both readings are true. The interesting question, the one I keep getting on calls with allocators who weren't here for the last three cycles, isn't whether RWA tokenization is real. It is. The question is which bridges still have to be crossed before it becomes infrastructure rather than a press cycle. From where I sit, there are three, and only one is even halfway built.
Bridge One: Liquidity, Not Issuance
Most of the RWA conversation is still framed around issuance. How do we get more assets on-chain? That framing was useful in 2023 when there were six serious issuers and the question was existential. In 2026 it's the wrong question. We have the assets. BlackRock's BUIDL crossed $2.5B in tokenized treasury holdings late last year. Franklin Templeton's on-chain money-market fund has been running multi-year. Maple, Centrifuge, and Goldfinch have a half-decade of credit data. Ondo, Backed, Superstate, OpenEden, the issuance side has solved the cold-start problem.
What we don't have, in any depth that matters, is secondary-market liquidity for those assets. The vast majority of tokenized treasuries today trade through redemption, you buy at NAV, you redeem at NAV, and the "market" is the issuer's balance sheet. That's not a market. That's a wrapped deposit account.
The teams I'm watching most closely right now are the ones treating this as the actual product problem. Pendle has built genuine duration markets on tokenized yields. Maple's Cash Management product is starting to function as a real liquidity venue, not just a primary-issuance rail. And on the equity side, disclosure first: the project I co-founded, SHIFT, issues bidirectional leveraged tokenized stocks on Solana, which is one of the few segments where on-chain liquidity is actually deeper than the off-chain reference market for the kinds of position sizes most users hold.
The general pattern: liquidity gets built when there's a reason for it to exist independent of the issuer. A market doesn't form because an asset is on-chain. It forms because a counterparty wants the other side. Most tokenized RWAs in 2026 still don't have a structural reason for that counterparty to show up.
Bridge Two: Regulation Across, Not Within, Jurisdictions
The second bridge is the one allocators are most polite about and most worried about. We don't lack regulatory frameworks for tokenized assets in 2026, we have too many of them, and they don't talk to each other.
MiCA gave Europe a workable regime. Singapore (MAS) and Dubai (VARA) have surprisingly sophisticated tokenized-asset rules. The U.S. has moved from prosecutorial ambiguity under the prior SEC posture to a still-incomplete-but-friendlier stance under the current one. The U.K. has a sandboxed digital securities pilot. Hong Kong has a STO regime that actually works for institutional issuers.
The bridge problem isn't that any one of these is wrong. It's that an asset issued under MiCA can't easily be held by a U.S. qualified purchaser. A Reg D-tokenized private placement can't easily flow to a Singapore family office. A Dubai-issued sukuk on a public chain is theoretically tradable everywhere, and practically tradable almost nowhere, because the receiving venues haven't built the compliance plumbing for cross-jurisdictional flows.
I wrote a Forbes piece on this last year, the framing I used was that 2024 was the year jurisdictions raced to write rules and 2025 was the year they realised the rules didn't compose. 2026 is the first year where the cross-jurisdictional plumbing is starting to matter more than the local rules themselves. The teams building credible answers, KYC primitives that travel with the asset, jurisdictional whitelists at the smart-contract level, transfer-restriction rails that update in real time, are quieter than the issuance teams but, I think, more important.
This is also the bridge where we at PRIM3 are spending more time. Crymbo, one of the portfolio companies I'd call out here, has been building institutional-grade digital asset infrastructure that's specifically designed to handle the cross-border compliance surface. It's unsexy work. It's also the part that decides whether tokenized RWAs become global capital infrastructure or stay siloed by passport.
Bridge Three: Settlement, On-Chain, Off-Chain, and the Layer in Between
The third bridge is the one I think most founders underestimate, because it's the most technical and the most boring: settlement.
When a tokenized treasury changes hands on Ethereum, the on-chain transfer settles in seconds. The corresponding off-chain claim, the actual title to the underlying T-bill held by the custodian, settles on a totally different rail, on a totally different timeline, governed by totally different legal infrastructure. For most issuers in 2026, those two settlements are reconciled nightly. For some, daily. For a few, intraday.
That gap is where most of the systemic risk in tokenized RWAs actually lives. If the on-chain claim and the off-chain claim ever diverge, because of a custodian failure, a smart-contract exploit, an oracle problem, a redemption-queue freeze — the tokenized asset becomes worth what the market thinks the bridge between them is worth, not what the underlying is worth. We saw a small-scale version of this play out with a couple of mid-sized tokenized credit protocols in 2024. We have not seen it play out in size, and I think the market is underpricing the probability that we eventually will.
The bridge here is the DTCC tokenization pilot on the institutional side and projects like Canton Network, Fnality, and Partior on the wholesale side. On the public-chain side, the work happening at the Ethereum L1 settlement layer, at the Solana base layer, and at credible RWA-focused L1s like Provenance is the bridge-building. None of this is glamorous. All of it is what decides whether trillions of dollars of tokenized assets become institutionally trusted infrastructure or stay parked at the current $17B retail-and-treasury-curious ceiling.
What I Tell Founders
When a tokenized-RWA founder pitches us at PRIM3 in 2026, the first question I ask now isn't what asset are you tokenizing. It's which of the three bridges does your wedge actually cross? If the answer is "all three," I get suspicious. If the answer is "none of them, we're issuing yet another flavour of tokenized treasury," I usually pass. If the answer is "we're solving the cross-jurisdictional compliance problem for tokenized credit specifically," or "we're building the settlement reconciliation layer between an L1 and a Tier-1 custodian," or "we're creating genuine secondary-market liquidity for a category of tokenized assets that doesn't have it" — that's when the conversation gets interesting.
I'll be honest about what this thesis doesn't explain. It doesn't explain the persistent retail demand for tokenized equity exposure, which is a separate category with its own bridge work happening (and, as I mentioned, where SHIFT is one of the bets I'm closest to). It doesn't explain stablecoins, which are RWAs in a literal sense but have already crossed all three bridges in ways the rest of the tokenized-asset universe hasn't. And it doesn't explain why some pure-issuance plays will still compound from here — the cold-start problem may be mostly solved at the category level, but for any specific underlying asset class, being the first credible issuer is still worth a lot.
What it does explain — at least for me, and across the 80+ projects in our portfolio that touch this space — is the gap between the $17B headline and the trillions of dollars of asset migration that still hasn't happened. The bridges are the bottleneck. The bridges are also the alpha.
The Forbes-Quotable Line
If I had to put a single sentence to it — the line I keep ending up at on calls: tokenization is no longer the hard problem; the hard problems are what happens after the asset is tokenized.
The next Bridge Notes will go deeper on the cross-jurisdictional compliance layer specifically — what I'm seeing across our portfolio, what the credible regulators are signalling privately, and where the next genuinely investable wedge sits. If you're building in this space and the framework lands, or doesn't, reach out via LinkedIn or pitch us at prim3.vc.