Avoiding NFT déjà vu: letting tokenisation scale without barriers

4 days ago 2

GlobalData

Wed, November 12, 2025 astatine 10:11 AM CST 4 min read

If you’ve attended immoderate concern panels precocious oregon glanced astatine the latest money launches, you’ve astir apt heard astir tokenisation, arsenic it’s everyplace these days. And with bully reason: much than $34 cardinal successful real-world assets person already moved on-chain, from tokenised US Treasuries to “digital gold” and adjacent existent estate. All of which makes it casual to judge that concern has yet reached its programmable, borderless future.

But look closer, and the world proves much intricate. According to caller research, astir tokenised assets hardly commercialized — BUIDL, the largest RWA token by marketplace capitalisation, has lone 85 holders, 30 progressive wallets, and 104 monthly transfers. Liquidity is thin, market-makers stay connected the sidelines, and the ineligible part, from wrappers to cross-border settlement, is inactive incomplete.

So wherefore aren’t RWAs moving yet? Let's effort to fig it out.

For each its excitement, the RWA marketplace remains trapped betwixt committedness and proof. And if I had to sanction the archetypal happening that comes to caput erstwhile asked what’s holding tokenisation back, it'd beryllium liquidity.

Most tokenised assets, whether Treasuries, funds, oregon backstage credit, hardly commercialized erstwhile issued, a world confirmed by probe revealing that “RWA tokens grounds debased trading volumes, agelong holding periods, and constricted capitalist participation.” That meagre enactment widens spreads, clouds valuations, and discourages market-makers who deficiency the extent to perpetrate capital. The effect is simply a marketplace that looks liquid connected insubstantial but behaves similar a closed loop — charismatic to issue, hard to exit.

Even if liquidity forms, regularisation is the adjacent bottleneck. When rules are consistent, markets follow; erstwhile they aren’t, advancement stalls, and, truthful far, tokenisation falls into the latter. Every jurisdiction defines integer securities differently: MiCA successful Europe, the DSS successful the UK, Project Guardian successful Singapore, and lawsuit instrumentality successful the US. That means each task demands bespoke ineligible enactment and compliance mapping — a reminder that geography inactive decides what tokenisation tin and cannot be.

The infrastructure needs to beryllium ready, too. Yet custody, settlement, and valuation systems stay fragmented, with astir pilots inactive moving extracurricular halfway banking rails. As a caller marketplace study observed, without trusted oracles and interoperable standards, tokenisation cannot yet present its afloat committedness of instant colony and collateral efficiency. This keeps institutions from treating tokens arsenic balance-sheet assets oregon eligible collateral, preventing the marketplace from scaling successful immoderate meaningful way.