Wouldn’t you hate it if a WhatsApp message arrived two days later because it first had to be verified, stamped, and cleared through three different stages. I mean, we expect communication to happen in real time. So, why doesn’t one have the same expectations from our financial markets?
In this day and age, swapping one stock for another still traditionally means selling, waiting for settlement, and only then buying again. However, tokenized stocks may be changing that.
The trend of tokenization
Tokenized equities entered the mainstream conversation following the landmark SpaceX IPO, the largest public offering in history at $75 billion. In the days that followed, blockchain-based platforms began offering tokenized exposure to SpaceX alongside other high-profile names such as Nvidia, Google, and Strategy, signalling growing demand for blockchain-native access to traditional assets.
At the same time, NASDAQ sought regulatory approval from the SEC to facilitate the trading of tokenized securities on its own exchange, underscoring that the shift was no longer confined to crypto-native platforms. What had long been viewed as an emerging concept is now increasingly becoming part of the broader market infrastructure conversation.
A tokenized stock is just a stock that lives on a blockchain. Same company, same value, same rights as any share you would buy through a broker. What changes is how it moves. It can be traded at any hour, settled in seconds, broken into smaller pieces so more people can access it, and transferred across borders without many layers that traditional securities depend on.
While equities continue to dominate the tokenization narrative, momentum is widening across other asset classes, with private credit crossing $10 billion on-chain, up from around $5 billion a year earlier, according to RWA.xyz. Real estate, commodities and structured debt are also gradually moving on-chain, reflecting early but growing institutional participation in markets long constrained by high entry thresholds and legacy infrastructure.
Together, these asset classes that represent hundreds of trillions of dollars in global value.
Not all blockchains are built for institutional settlement though. Many prioritise open-market activity, where fee volatility and variable settlement times are acceptable trade-offs.
How will this market trend scale in the future?
Regulated tokenization, however, requires predictable fees, deterministic settlement and banking-grade infrastructure—capabilities most public blockchains were not designed for. For its part, $XDC Network has focused on this infrastructure, enabling institutional-grade tokenization well before tokenized equities gained mainstream attention.
$XDC Network has processed more than $1.1 billion in tokenized receivables, private credit and commodities, reflecting years of institutional adoption. In Brazil, for instance, Liqi Digital Assets reported BRL 1.2 billion (approximately US$230 million) in cumulative tokenized credit operations by early 2026, including BRL 600 million (approximately US$115 million) settled in January and February alone.
According to Atul Khekade, Co-founder of the $XDC Network,
Tokenization conversation has been dominated by assets that were already easy to move. The harder problem is the ones that were never accessible to begin with. Those markets are worth orders of magnitude more, and the infrastructure gap is the only thing standing between here and there. We are at the beginning of the real tokenization decade, not the end.
BCG and Ripple project the tokenized asset market hitting $18.9 trillion by 2033. Standard Chartered extends that to $30 trillion by 2034 when cross-border credit is included. The distance between those numbers and today is almost entirely a question of infrastructure. It’s a question of which networks can handle the volume, the compliance requirements, and the institutional expectations of the markets that have not yet come on-chain.
The regulatory environment is moving to support it too. Brazil, Singapore, the UK, and the EU have each established legal frameworks giving tokenized financial instruments formal standing. The US GENIUS Act, passed in July 2025, created federal infrastructure for payment stablecoins. The focus is no longer on whether tokenization will be permitted, but on how quickly it can be adopted at scale.
The SpaceX IPO gave tokenization a moment everyone could point to. However, the infrastructure that makes it work at scale was not built in the weeks after a headline.
It was built over years, in the parts of the market that never made the news. That is what the next decade of finance runs on.
