Tokenized Treasurys Have Captured the Easy Capital and the Next Growth Phase Requires New Categories

[etfs]

The tokenized RWA market's growth to $30 billion has been impressive, but the composition of that growth carries an important implication for what comes next. Tokenized US Treasurys account for roughly half the total market by value and have been the primary magnet for institutional capital entering the space. The appeal is straightforward: government-backed yield, regulatory clarity, and 24/7 on-chain liquidity combine to make tokenized Treasurys a genuinely better version of an instrument institutions already understand and use. The rapid growth phase for this category has been driven by institutions discovering and allocating to a product that clearly makes sense for their needs. Zeus Research analyst Dominick John argues that the rate of expansion in this category should moderate as the easiest flow has already been allocated.

The next leg of meaningful growth depends on whether tokenized equities, private credit funds, and non-Treasury financial instruments can achieve the same institutional adoption that Treasurys have demonstrated. These categories are significantly more complex from both a regulatory and operational standpoint. Tokenized equity requires navigating shareholder rights, disclosure requirements, and market structure rules that vary across jurisdictions. Private credit tokenization raises questions about liquidity, valuation methodology, and the rights of token holders relative to traditional fund investors. Tokenized commodities like gold have already shown traction, particularly during the geopolitical volatility of 2026 where 24/7 market access provided genuine utility when traditional venues were closed. But the $28 trillion vision that ARK Invest projects for digital assets by 2030 requires the full asset class spectrum to tokenize at scale, not just the category that was easiest to start with.

[cryptohog]

Franklin Templeton's tokenized fund being used as Binance collateral and Standard Chartered enabling BlackRock Treasurys as OKX collateral means regulated TradFi instruments are now embedded in crypto trading infrastructure, which is a convergence that seemed implausible three years ago and is now just operational reality.

[cryptoenthusiast]

Tokenized gold was useful when markets closed during geopolitical volatility and that single use case did more for the 24/7 access argument than three years of conference presentations.