Eleven kinds of tokenized asset. Four of them trade.

On BNB Chain there is a token that stands for one share of the Invesco QQQ fund, the American index fund that holds Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft and most of the rest of big technology. Anyone the issuer will sell to can buy it at four in the morning, from a crypto wallet, without a broker.

Last month that single token traded $1.67 billion. On its own it was nearly a third of everything the tokenization industry sold on public blockchains. Not a third of the fund tokens. A third of everything. Every tokenized share, every gold bar, every euro, every loan fund, every barrel of oil that anyone has ever put on a chain and offered for sale.

What a tokenized asset is

Asset tokenization is a simple idea with a lot of money behind it. Someone buys a real thing, a share or a gold bar or a Treasury bill, and locks it in custody. They then issue a crypto token that stands for it, one for one. The token trades on a blockchain, which means it settles in seconds, needs no broker, and never closes for the night. If you want out of the underlying asset, you hand the token back.

Banks and asset managers have spent three years building this. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Apollo, VanEck, WisdomTree and Janus Henderson all run tokenized funds. Binance, Backed, Ondo, Backpack and Robinhood all sell tokenized shares. Tether and Paxos sell gold. Circle and Société Générale sell euros. Between them they have put stocks, index funds, government debt, private credit, gold, silver, property, carbon credits, oil and reinsurance on public chains.

Bitquery indexes every trade on every chain those tokens live on. So we took 31 days of the complete record across nine blockchains, 3.3 million tokens with 860,000 of them active enough to have a market, worked out which ones are genuinely what they claim to be, and counted what each asset class actually traded. Four of the eleven classes cleared $100 million in the month. The rest did not come close, and one of them, the class that leads every chart the industry publishes about itself, turns out not to trade in any ordinary sense of the word.

One number below is a floor rather than a total, and it is worth saying so up front. Roughly three in every hundred trades are priced against a token we cannot value reliably, so we leave them out. Counted from the tokenized asset's own side they would add roughly $300 million.

01 Eleven classes, five orders of magnitude

Across all nine chains, tokenized real-world assets traded $5.45 billion in the month, on 28.8 million trades, spread over 548 contracts we could authenticate one by one. Company shares and the funds that track indexes are almost nine tenths of that. Everything else shares the remainder.

The gap between the top and the bottom of that chart is not a rounding difference. Shares traded more in a single day than property tokens managed in the whole month, and the ratio between the largest class and the smallest runs to six figures. These are not eleven markets of different sizes. Four are markets and the rest are inventory.

One thing has been left out of every figure above. A large group of tokens sold as “real-world asset” plays are not assets at all: they are shares in the companies doing the tokenizing. Chainlink, Ondo, Centrifuge, Maple, Parcl and Propy are all businesses with a token, and lumping them in adds $506.2 million to the total without adding a single tokenized anything. They are counted separately and excluded here.

02 What each of the eleven is

The classes below are the whole tokenized-asset market as we can see it. Each one is a different real thing standing behind a token, and each has a different reason for trading or not.

Company shares

A token that stands for one share in a listed company. Binance, Backed, Ondo, Backpack and Robinhood all issue them, covering Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and a few hundred others.

Index and commodity funds

The same idea applied to an exchange-traded fund: one token, one share of the fund. This is where the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100 and the large gold and oil funds live.

Gold

One token, one troy ounce, held in a vault and audited. Tether Gold and Paxos Gold are almost the whole class, and it is the oldest tokenized asset that people actually buy.

Currencies other than the dollar

A euro, a franc, a Singapore dollar or a yen issued as a token and redeemable one for one, the way a dollar stablecoin works. Circle and Société Générale are the largest issuers.

Private credit

A share in a fund that lends money. Maple's is the only one with a real secondary market, and it is the one class here where the trades are institutional in size.

Shares in private companies

Exposure to companies you cannot buy on an exchange, among them OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Kalshi. What the token actually entitles the holder to varies by issuer and is worth reading closely.

Reinsurance

A share of the premiums an insurer collects for insuring other insurers. One issuer, OnRe, on Solana, and it did not exist in July.

Silver

One token, one troy ounce, allocated by bar serial number. Dominion launched the first one with a market in August 2026.

Government debt funds

A share in a fund holding Treasury bills and money-market instruments, paying a yield. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Ondo, VanEck, WisdomTree, Janus Henderson and Apollo all issue one. This is the class the industry quotes when it describes its own size.

Other commodities

Oil, uranium and gemstones have all been tokenized by somebody. None of them has found a buyer.

Property

A share in a building, or in a company that owns buildings. Most of it lives on chains we do not index, and the part we can see does not trade.

03 The four that clear $100 million

Shares and index funds are two of the four, and between them almost the whole market. That one is real and busy, and we have measured it on its own elsewhere, where it turns out it cannot absorb a $10,000 order without moving the price. The other two that clear the line are gold and the non-dollar currencies, and they get there for different reasons. A fifth class, private credit, falls just short on volume and is the most interesting of the lot anyway.

Gold is the oldest tokenized asset that anyone actually buys, and it behaves like a real market. Tether Gold and Paxos Gold between them carry almost all of it, each token standing for one troy ounce held in a vault. It trades on four chains at once, and its typical trade is several times the size of a typical tokenized share trade.

Currencies other than the dollar get used because somebody needs to settle a bill in euros. Circle's euro token does most of the volume, alongside Société Générale's, a Swiss franc, a Singapore dollar and a yen. Nobody is buying these to speculate on the euro. They are plumbing, and plumbing gets used.

Private credit missed the $100 million line and is still the one class where the trades are institutional in size. Maple's loan-fund token averages a few thousand dollars a trade, and hundreds of its trades last month were above $100,000. That is more large trades than the entire tokenized-share market managed, from a fraction of the activity.

Everything except private credit is a retail market wearing an institutional label.

Two classes on that chart did not exist when we last looked in July. Tokenized silver arrived in August: one ounce a token, allocated by bar serial number, vaulted in Texas. In its first weeks it did more than every tokenized government-debt fund we can see, combined. It also managed 96,585 trades without a single one above $10,000. An entire asset class opened, and no institution has walked through the door.

The other newcomer is stranger and larger. A Solana token called ONyc sells exposure to reinsurance premiums, the business of insuring insurance companies. It traded $54.7 million last month, which is roughly twenty times the combined volume of every tokenized Treasury fund we can see. Most maps of this industry do not have a row for it.

04 The funds that never change hands

Tokenized government-debt funds are the flagship of this whole industry. They are what gets cited when someone says tokenization has reached the tens of billions: BlackRock's BUIDL, Franklin Templeton's BENJI, Ondo's OUSG, funds from VanEck, WisdomTree, Janus Henderson and Apollo. They hold Treasury bills and money-market instruments, they pay a yield, and they settle on a public blockchain.

They also have, between them, essentially no market. Every one we could find put together traded $2.7 million last month across all nine chains. That is less than the tokenized silver token managed in its first fortnight, and about a thousandth of what tokenized shares did.

A trading figure alone would be unfair to them, because these funds are not built to trade. Most are transfer-restricted, sold to institutions who subscribe directly with the issuer and redeem the same way. So we looked at the other record instead, and counted every address that moved them at all.

Franklin Templeton's fund was sent 84 times on Ethereum during the month, and every one of those was the fund issuing new tokens. Between third parties it did not move once. On Polygon the pattern repeats exactly, down to the transfer count.

BlackRock's fund, the most cited of them, had eleven distinct senders. Apollo's private credit fund moved less than $10,000 between anyone other than the issuer. For comparison, Tether Gold was sent by more than twenty thousand different addresses on the same chain over the same days.

These are not markets that happen to be quiet. They are subscription ledgers with a blockchain underneath.

That may be exactly what their investors want, and none of it says the funds are badly run or that the assets are not there. A money-market fund does not need a secondary market to do its job. But it does mean the headline number the industry quotes for itself, assets under management, measures how much was subscribed rather than how much anything is used. The two get reported as if they were the same thing.

One limit is worth stating. Several of these funds also live on Stellar, Avalanche and Aptos, which we do not index, so their totals here cover only the chains we can see. On Base, the third chain we checked, there is no real BUIDL or BENJI at all. Every token by those names is a memecoin, which is its own kind of answer.

05 Eleven thousand copies

Authenticating a tokenized asset is most of the work in a study like this, because a token can call itself anything. We checked every candidate against the issuer's published contract address, and where an asset has a price we can look up, against that price too.

What falls out is a second market, larger by trade count than the real one. 11,322 contracts carry the name or the ticker of a genuine tokenized asset at an address that is not it. On Solana alone there are more than two hundred tokens called NVIDIA and more than three hundred called Robinhood.

Most of this is manufactured. Half of all trades by these copies buy and sell inside a single transaction. The same wallet, the same pool, in and out again in one step, which no buyer would ever do and no market would produce. More than half the copies were alive for three days or fewer. Four in ten traded in one pool and nowhere else.

The reason this matters beyond the fraud itself is that it makes dollar figures for this sector unusable. We measured the copies' volume two defensible ways and got answers an order of magnitude apart, because a handful of wash trades can move the total by billions. So for the copies we count contracts and trades, and keep dollars for assets we can authenticate.

A single case shows how the inflation is built. Banking Circle issues a regulated euro token called EURITE on Ethereum and BNB Chain, and it traded just under $200,000 last month. A Solana token that is not it, using the same name, appears in the raw record at $126 million.

That $126 million is priced against a counterfeit Circle euro, a counterfeit MUFG, a counterfeit XRP, a counterfeit Solana and a token called $TAXI whose typical trade is a quarter of a billion units. Not one of its counterparties is real money. Valued only against currencies that have a price, the same token traded $339. The fake was also pegged correctly to the euro throughout, so the price test it would pass tells you nothing. The only check that works is the boring one: take the contract address from the issuer's own site and compare it character by character.

06 One product, a third of the market

The other structural fact is how little of this market there is once you stop counting contracts and start counting money. Half of everything is three contracts. Five sixths of it is twenty.

Five in every six contracts we authenticated never saw a single trade of $10,000 in the whole month, and seven in ten did under $100,000 in total. The long tail of tokenized assets is inventory sitting on a shelf, not a thin market.

Where it trades is its own surprise. Ethereum is where nearly all of this is issued, and it carries about a twenty-fifth of the trading. The volume sits on BNB Chain and Solana, where the retail crowd is. Issuance and trading have separated onto different chains.

07 The one that already worked

There is a tokenized real-world asset that succeeded so completely that people stopped calling it one. A dollar stablecoin is a claim on bank deposits and Treasury bills, issued as a token, redeemable one for one. That is the definition at the top of this page, word for word.

On Ethereum alone, over the same 31 days, dollar tokens moved roughly $1.8 trillion. Every other tokenized asset on all nine chains combined moved $5.45 billion. The ratio is more than three hundred to one, and Ethereum is only one of the chains those dollars run on.

That comparison is rough. Transfers include payments and routing between protocols, so they count more than trading does. No adjustment closes a gap that size. Tokenization has produced exactly one asset that the world uses at scale, and it is the dollar. For everything else the open question was never whether it could be put on a chain, which it plainly can, but whether anyone on the other side wants to buy it.

08 What we could not see

The obvious objection to a study like this is that the market is somewhere we are not looking. We checked. Of 1,415 tokenized assets listed in CoinGecko's real-world-asset categories, 1,358 have a contract on at least one chain we index. These assets are issued on several chains at once, so the ones on Avalanche or Aptos are almost always on Ethereum too. Fifty-seven live only somewhere we cannot reach.

Two real blind spots remain, and both are venues rather than tokens. Figure's private credit business runs on Provenance, its own chain, which we do not index. Bank issuance on Canton is permissioned, so a public index cannot see it either way. Nothing here speaks to either.

What survives all of that was not what we went looking for. 2,634 registered tokenized assets sit on chains we index perfectly well and never reached 25 trades in a month. Roughly six in seven of the tokenized world is inert, on chains where we would see it move if it did.

09 How this was measured

The window is 27 July to 26 August 2026, 31 days, which is the full retention of the trade index this study runs on. Chains covered are BNB Chain, Solana, Robinhood Chain, Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism and Tron. Transfer and issuance figures come from the per-chain archives over the same days.

The universe was built by sweeping every token that traded, rather than by searching for the names we expected to find. Candidates were then authenticated three independent ways: against issuers' published contract addresses, against an external registry of tokenized assets, and, where the asset has a public price, by checking the on-chain price tracks it. A previous study of ours lost three quarters of the market by filtering on names before authenticating, which is the mistake this design exists to avoid.

Three corrections shape the totals. Duplicate rows and multi-pool routing inflate raw trade counts by roughly a third, and both are removed. Dollar values are computed from the settled side of each trade using the daily price of the settlement token, matched on contract address rather than ticker, because tickers can be faked and one faked ticker was enough to turn $16 million into $10 billion in an early draft. Trades settled against a token we cannot price are dropped, which is where the floor caveat at the top comes from.

10 The record

The contracts behind the claims above, for anyone who wants to check them.