The tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market will continue to grow in 2026, fueled by adoption in emerging market economies, according to Jesse Knutson, head of operations at crypto exchange Bitfinex.
Emerging market economies experience “friction” in capital formation and attracting foreign investment, Knutson told Cointelegraph.
Tokenizing real-world assets, the process of representing physical or traditional assets on blockchain networks, fixes this by enabling onchain capital formation and bypassing traditional financial intermediaries, he said. Knutson added:
“Emerging markets also tend to ‘leapfrog’ infrastructure that holds back developed markets, adopting digital rails, including stablecoin settlement, faster than markets with entrenched legacy plumbing.”
Tokenization also enables fractionalization of assets, democratizing access to investments that may be cost-prohibitive for the average retail investor, Knutson said.
Companies that can offer fixed returns to investors but cannot acquire traditional financing are the biggest beneficiaries of asset tokenization, he added.
Fixed-income instruments, including US Treasuries and money market funds, are the most popular assets for tokenization in developed economies, while tokenizing real estate and commodities are the most popular use cases in developing economies, he said.
Knutson forecasts that the tokenized RWA total market capitalization will swell to several trillion dollars over the next decade, but the growth is dependent on major issuers moving from pilot programs and sandboxes to actual commercial products.
Related: Tokenization will disrupt finance faster than digital disrupted media: Crypto exec
Tokenizing traditional financial assets onchain still has several key challenges
Despite the positive outlook on the future of the RWA market, several challenges remain, including the legal enforceability of onchain contracts, ensuring enough liquidity for settlement without slippage, and creating investor protection frameworks, Knutson said.
Creating uniform interoperability standards between different blockchain networks and platforms where tokenized assets are issued is also a key challenge that must be overcome to achieve mass adoption, he told Cointelegraph.
Different token standards and discrepancies between permissioned blockchains and permissionless crypto ecosystems create technical challenges for RWA issuers.
Issuers must create tokenized products that can be transferred throughout the diverse crypto ecosystem and used as collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications to realize the full potential of onchain assets.
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