---
title: "What works, what doesn't, and 2027 to 2030"
author: Mariusz Szyma
date: 2026-09-24
lang: en
canonical: https://szyma.co/en/blog/rwa/whats-next/
series: "RWA: Past, Present and Future"
series_part: 11/12
series_url: https://szyma.co/en/blog/rwa/
data_as_of: 4–10 Sep 2026
---

# What works, what doesn't, and 2027 to 2030

Tokenization has been sold as a way to put every asset on a blockchain. After nine years of attempts, a fair question is which parts of it actually work. The short answer: two segments pass every hard test, a few pass some, and the rest hold value that nobody uses. This chapter gives the tests, the verdicts, the problems still open, and three scenarios for the next four years.

## What you'll learn

- Apply four tests that separate a used tokenized market from a register.
- Give a verdict for each major segment and explain why it passed or failed.
- Name the open problems that no blockchain upgrade will fix.
- Read a trillion-dollar forecast for what it counts.
- Describe three scenarios to 2030 and the event that would confirm each.

## Four tests for a real tokenized market

A token existing on a chain proves little. The useful question is whether people use it in ways they could not before. Four tests answer that, each with a number and a threshold.

| Test | What it measures | Threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Turnover | Yearly transfer volume divided by the value of the asset | above 10× a year is a real secondary market; below 2× is a subscription register |
| Active addresses | Share of holders who did anything in the last 30 days | below 5% means the token is held, not used |
| DeFi use | Share of the segment pledged as collateral or borrowed against | the only proof that other people's contracts accept it |
| Continuity | Years the product has run without a change of terms | three years or more |

**Turnover** is the headline test because volume cannot be faked by a slide deck. It has one catch: on-chain volume also counts new tokens being created and redeemed, so the ratio is an upper bound on real trading. A fund whose turnover is 1× a year is a subscription list, whatever its marketing says.

The continuity test exists because of how products in this market end. The most common ending is neither a hack nor a default. It is the issuer deciding to stop, as with Mountain Protocol's USDM in 2025, covered in [Who's who](/en/blog/rwa/whos-who/).

## Verdicts by segment

Run the tests on each segment and a clear order appears.

![Four tests against seven segments sold as RWA: only stablecoins pass all four, and tokenized gold passes three with partial DeFi use, on readings from May to Sep 2026.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/reality-criteria-matrix.ec979e8b.svg)

The figure scores seven things sold as RWA. The table below keeps the six that hold a real asset and leaves out perpetual futures, which fail the definition of an RWA before any test applies.

| Segment | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Stablecoins | Passes all four | Mass use since 2014; about 286 million holders in Sep 2026 |
| Tokenized gold | Passes three, DeFi use partial | About 71× turnover a year; PAXG since 2019, XAUT since 2020 |
| Tokenized Treasuries | Works for a narrow client | A register, about 1.4× a year; yield below the underlying |
| Private credit | One model works, one failed | Overcollateralized lending survives; unsecured lending wound down |
| Tokenized stocks | Registration without use | Holders up, active addresses down in the same month |
| Real estate | Failed twice | RealT liquidated in July 2026 |

Gold works because gold is simple. It pays no cash flow and has no borrower, so there is no NAV to calculate, no dividend to distribute and no credit to judge. A bar in a London vault has an institutional ticket of about 200 mn USD; a gold token sells a fraction of the same bar to anyone, at any hour. It is the one segment where tokenization solved a problem nobody had solved before.

Tokenized Treasuries are the largest serious segment and a working product for one kind of client. They paid about 3.3% in July 2026 while the Federal Reserve's policy rate sat at 4.25 to 4.50%. That gap of about 100 bps is the price of on-chain settlement. A DAO treasury or a crypto trading firm pays it gladly. A saver buying bond exposure gets more from a Treasury-bill ETF.

The trading side is quieter still. On the Securitize platform, which issues BUIDL and several others, only 61 addresses were active in a month out of 1,872 holders, well under the 5% threshold.

Private credit ran a natural experiment. Maple lent without collateral from 2021, lost about 54 mn USD when borrowers failed in 2022, and switched to loans backed by 150% or more of collateral in May 2024. Goldfinch kept the unsecured model and voted to wind down in June 2026.

Stocks show the opposite of adoption: in the 30 days to 2 September 2026, holders of tokenized stocks rose 159% while monthly active addresses fell 90%, according to RWA.xyz.

> **Watch out:** The most liquid "RWA" is not an RWA. Perpetual futures on real assets traded 524.8 bn USD in the first quarter of 2026 (CoinGecko). A perpetual has no asset behind it and no one who redeems it, so it fails the basic definition from [chapter 1](/en/blog/rwa/what-is-an-rwa/). Mixing it into market statistics inflates every liquidity claim.

## Value without use

A large share of the tokenized market is value that sits still. Stobox's mid-2026 report found 56% of tokenized assets had no transfer in a typical week. Part of that is by design: a fund share for qualified buyers was never meant to trade.

> **Deep dive: Two idle figures that do not agree**
>
> The 56% figure counts value in a universe of about 60 bn USD. A second reading of the same data looked only at assets above 100,000 USD and found that 379 of 1,289 had any transfer in a typical week, which makes about 70.6% idle by count. The two describe different sets and should not be averaged. Either way, most tokenized value does not move.

The rest is products that exist on paper and nowhere else. An energy token called JMWH, about 861 mn USD according to Tiger Research, is listed on no exchange at all. The only permissionless RWA index, mvRWA, held about 9,000 USD. In category statistics, both look exactly like a working product.

![Six segments where value exists and use does not, each with the metric that shows what is missing, as of 2026.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/segments-without-use.957b46a6.svg)

The reason matters for anyone building. Tokenizing an asset does not create a buyer. It only lowers the cost of reaching a buyer who already wants the asset. Where no buyer existed, as with fractional Detroit rental homes, the token changed nothing except how the loss was recorded.

## Problems nobody has solved

Four problems remain open in September 2026, and none of them is a blockchain problem.

**Valuation without a market.** A private-credit fund has no live price, so an administrator computes NAV and an oracle carries it on-chain. On 4 September 2026, the author read the NAV feed for Superstate's USCC on Ethereum: its last update was 225 days old and it raised no error. Any lending market reading it would have seen a normal-looking number. [Getting prices on-chain](/en/blog/rwa/oracles-and-nav/) has the full measurement.

**Keys.** The holder's private key is not the strongest key on a regulated token. On Ethereum, one externally owned account can replace BUIDL's entire contract code in a single transaction, with no multisig and no delay. [Who holds the keys](/en/blog/rwa/who-holds-the-keys/) compares this with other funds.

**Redemption.** The token trades around the clock, but the right to exit does not. ACRED and HLSCOPE let holders redeem at most 5% of the fund per quarter. If many holders want out in the same week, most of them wait.

**Fragmentation.** The same asset on two chains is two different markets. Stobox measured price gaps of 1 to 3% between venues for identical assets and a cost of 2 to 5% to move capital between chains. No diversified on-chain RWA index exists, because its parts have incompatible transfer rules and redemption terms.

These four share a root cause. Every compliance rule added to a token's transfer function shuts out some counterparty: a whitelist shuts out open trading pools, a sender check shuts out routers. So far no product has both full compliance and full composability.

## Forecasts and three scenarios to 2030

Bank and consulting forecasts for tokenized assets range from about 2 to 30 tn USD. They differ mostly in what they count, not in how optimistic they are.

| Forecaster | Date | Forecast | What it counts |
|---|---|---|---|
| McKinsey | Jun 2024 | about 1.9 tn USD by 2030 | Excludes stablecoins and deposits |
| Standard Chartered | May 2026 | 4 tn USD by end-2028 | Half of it stablecoins |
| Citi | Jun 2026 | 5.5 tn USD base case | Starts from a base of about 17 bn USD |
| BCG with ADDX | 2022 | 16.1 tn USD by 2030 | 10% of world GDP tokenized; later cut to 9.4 tn |

**Compound annual growth rate** (CAGR) is the steady yearly rate that turns a starting value into an ending one. It shows how aggressive a "cautious" forecast is. McKinsey's base case needs the distributed market to grow about 50 times, a CAGR near 146% for four years. That is only a third below the market's own recent pace.

Every one of these forecasts models issuance: how much will be put on a chain. None of them models turnover, idle assets, redemption gates or wind-downs. They forecast what gets printed, not what gets used.

The scenarios below are built the other way round. Each is defined by an event that can be checked on a calendar, and each names what would prove it wrong. The anchor is the distributed market, which stood at about 39 bn USD on 10 September 2026 (RWA.xyz).

![Three scenarios to 2030: the end-2027 size of the distributed market, the events that must happen, the shape of the market after 2027, and what would falsify each; the author's scenarios on data to Sep 2026.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/rwa-scenarios-2030.4f888a2b.svg)

The bear case, about 30 to 35 bn USD at the end of 2027, needs three things. The DTC tokenization service, planned for October 2026, slips or launches narrow. The CLARITY Act, the US market-structure bill, is not law by the end of 2027. Rate cuts push tokenized Treasury yields well below 3%, so treasuries that hold them for yield leave. By 2030 the market looks much like today: gold and Treasury registers, and more wind-downs.

The base case, about 65 to 75 bn USD, needs DTC to launch as announced with measurable volume, and deposits in RWA-collateral lending markets to pass 1 bn USD. By 2030, tokenized fund shares would serve as everyday collateral at exchanges and lenders, which is the use that pays for the whole stack.

The bull case, above 75 bn USD, needs the base case plus a regulated US venue where stock tokens and ordinary shares trade on one order book. Nasdaq's proposal to trade tokenized securities under the DTC pilot is the path to watch. By 2030 the line between a share and a token would blur for US equities.

> **My take:** Tokenization has not created a market. It has plugged into markets that already existed. Treasury funds grew because crypto firms already held billions in stablecoins and wanted yield on-chain; real estate failed twice because the buyer had to be invented. The next five years will be decided in servicing and redemption: who keeps the register, who values an asset with no market, and what happens when the issuer decides a product no longer pays. Securitize's own results point the same way. In the first quarter of 2026 its tokenization revenue fell 1% year on year while its servicing revenue grew 201%.

## What to watch next

- **The DTC tokenization service**: whether the October 2026 launch happens, and with what volume. It separates the bear case from the base case.
- **RWA-collateral deposits**: whether lending markets that accept tokenized funds pass 1 bn USD of deposits. That is the test of DeFi use at scale.
- **Tokenized Treasury yields after rate cuts**: below 3%, the 100 bps cost of the layer becomes hard to justify for holders who want yield.
- **The CLARITY Act in the US Senate**: without it, a regulated US venue for stock tokens stays out of reach.
- **The next wind-down**: which product closes next, and whether holders get their money back through the documents or through a secondary pool.

## Key takeaways

1. A tokenized market is real when people trade, use and pledge the token, not when the token merely exists; turnover, active addresses, DeFi use and continuity test that.
2. Only stablecoins pass all four tests and only tokenized gold comes close, and both predate the RWA story.
3. Tokenized Treasuries are a useful register for crypto-native treasuries, priced about 100 bps below the underlying, and not a traded market.
4. The biggest open problems are valuation without a market, admin keys, redemption gates and fragmentation, and none is solved by a faster chain.
5. Forecasts in the trillions count issuance; none models whether the assets are used.
6. The useful forecast names a checkable event; for 2027 that event is the DTC tokenization service.

## Glossary

- **Turnover ratio**: yearly transfer volume divided by the asset's value. An upper bound on real trading, because it also counts creation and redemption.
- **Active address**: a wallet that did something in the last 30 days, as opposed to a holder, which only holds.
- **Composability**: the ability of a token to be used by other people's contracts without asking permission, for example as collateral in a lending market.
- **Redemption gate**: a limit on how much of a fund can be redeemed in one period, such as 5% per quarter.
- **CAGR**: compound annual growth rate, the steady yearly rate that links a start value to an end value.
- **DTC**: the Depository Trust Company, the central depository for US securities, which is piloting tokenized securities under a 2025 SEC no-action letter.
- **Wind-down**: the issuer's decision to close a product.

## Go deeper

- [Where RWA stands in September 2026](/en/blog/rwa/state-of-the-market/): the current numbers behind these verdicts.
- [RWAs in DeFi](/en/blog/rwa/rwa-in-defi/): the DeFi-use test measured in full.
- [How to analyze any RWA in 30 minutes](/en/blog/rwa/thirty-minute-teardown/): the four tests applied to one product.
- [Maple](/en/blog/companies/maple/): profile of the credit protocol that changed its model and survived.
- 🟢 RWA.xyz dashboard, https://app.rwa.xyz/
- 🟢 SEC, Statement on Tokenized Securities, 28 Jan 2026, https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/corp-fin-statement-tokenized-securities-012826-statement-tokenized-securities

## Sources

- 🟢 RWA.xyz, main dashboard, 10 Sep 2026: distributed 39.15 bn USD, https://app.rwa.xyz/
- 🟢 RWA.xyz, platforms page, 3 Sep 2026: stablecoin holders; Securitize platform page, about Aug 2026: holders and active addresses; stocks page, 2 Sep 2026: holders and active addresses, https://app.rwa.xyz/
- 🟢 CoinGecko, RWA Report 2026, data to 31 Mar 2026: gold spot volume and perpetual volume.
- 🟢 SEC, no-action letter to the Depository Trust Company, 11 Dec 2025; Nasdaq filing SR-NASDAQ-2025-072, 20 Jan 2026, https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/sro/nasdaq/2026/34-105047.pdf
- 🟢 Securitize, first-quarter 2026 results, PR Newswire, 20 May 2026.
- 🟢 Author's on-chain read, Ethereum, 4 Sep 2026: USCC NAV feed age and BUIDL proxy ownership.
- 🟡 Tiger Research, 2026 Commodity Tokenization Market Analysis, 27 Feb 2026: gold ticket size, JMWH.
- 🟡 Stobox, The State of RWA Tokenization, 2026 Mid-Year Report, 10 Jul 2026: idle assets, price gaps, cost of moving capital.
- 🟡 Spark, Tokenized Private Credit, Aug 2026: Maple losses and model change, Goldfinch.
- 🟡 CryptoBriefing and Cointribune, Jul 2026: RealT liquidation.
- 🟡 Ledger Insights and CoinDesk, Jun 2024: McKinsey forecast.
- 🟡 The Block, 18 May 2026: Standard Chartered forecast.
- 🟡 Cryptonomist, about 1 Jun 2026: Citi forecast.
- 🟡 CoinDesk, 8 Aug 2026, and CNBC, 1 Sep 2026: CLARITY Act Senate timetable, https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/08/08/
- 🟡 CoinDesk, 4 May 2026, and Forkast, about 31 Aug 2026: DTCC tokenization service timetable.

## Caveats

- The scenarios are the author's construction on dated inputs, not a forecast by any bank.
- Turnover figures are upper bounds, because transfer volume includes creation and redemption of tokens.