More Holders, Little Trading: The RWA Liquidity Problem Is Worse Than You Think

Let me ask you something straight. Does real-world asset trading on crypto exchanges feel like a genuine revolution, or does it feel like a warehouse full of boxes nobody opens? I think you know the answer.

London's trading industry is coming home!

The RWA sector has a serious liquidity problem, and saying it out loud shouldn't make anyone uncomfortable. The numbers tell the story better than any narrative can.

The Scale of the Liquidity Gap

Start with the scale of the gap. Pantera Capital’s September 2026 report surveyed 671 tokenized assets worth a combined $331.8 billion. Permissioned products, the kind that require whitelisting and approval to hold, make up 59% of the total market cap. They contribute exactly 0.2% of spot trading volume. Read that again.

More than 50% of this sector's value barely moves. Open-access products account for 41% of market cap and generate 99.8% of all spot trading. The sector splits cleanly into two worlds. One world trades. The other sits still.

BlackRock’s BUIDL fund offers the clearest illustration. The fund holds $2.77 billion across 10 chains. It has 106 investors and recorded just 191 transfers in a single month. That's roughly six transfers per day for a multi-billion-dollar product.

Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund reported 562 holders and $0 in monthly transfer volume. Compare that velocity with stablecoins, which turn over roughly 21 times their float every month. BUIDL turns over 0.12 times. That is a 180-fold gap in how much these assets actually move.

The IMF weighed in with its October 2026 Global Financial Stability Report, and the findings deserve attention. IMF staff described tokenized markets as small, fragmented, relatively illiquid and roughly 1.5 times more volatile than traditional counterparts. Most tokenized activity happens in repurchase agreements, which average $300 billion to $350 billion in daily volume.

Everything else, including credit, money market funds and tokenized equities, adds just $65 billion. To put that in perspective, the US repo market alone trades about $13 trillion daily. The entire tokenized universe outside repos represents a rounding error against traditional finance.

Holder Growth Does Not Equal Liquidity

Now here comes the counterargument, and it has real data behind it. BNB Chain’s RWA holder count crossed 2 million in early October 2026, reaching 2,032,387 addresses, up 15.56% in just 30 days.

Tokenized stockholders across all chains hit 4.3 million by late September, a 43-fold increase in a single year. BNB Chain alone holds 39% of all on-chain RWA holders. These growth rates look spectacular. They also demand context.

Holder counts and trading depth are entirely different things. Only 29 of 110 major tokenized products, those with market caps above $10 million, meet even basic thresholds for both liquidity and distribution. That is roughly 26%. More than 50% of the analysed market shows no meaningful secondary trading activity.

Why Some Tokenized Assets Trade Better

Tokenized gold stands as the exception that proves the rule. PAXG and XAUT together generated $90.7 billion in Q1 2026 spot volume, surpassing the full-year 2025 total of $84.64 billion. Average monthly spot volumes reached $5.72 billion for PAXG and $5.32 billion for XAUT.

Gold works because it has natural turnover, broad appeal and deep market-maker interest. Tokenized treasuries do not work the same way because they function as buy-and-hold instruments. The Pantera data shows tokenized stocks achieving 204.6% monthly turnover while rate products languish at 0.1%. The asset class determines the liquidity profile, not the blockchain.

Turnover rates for tokenized stocks hit 204.6% in June, making them the most actively traded RWA category. The market is not uniformly illiquid. The problem is concentrated in the market-cap-dominant products. Tokenized treasuries grew from $13 billion to $16.5 billion between Q1 and Q2 2026, yet they generate almost no secondary trading.

Private credit expanded from $4.1 billion to $5.1 billion, with similarly low turnover. The biggest, most institutional products are precisely the ones that do not trade.

Table: Tokenized Stocks vs. Tokenized Rate Products

Issuance Is Easy, but Liquidity Is Not

This is the inflated part. Issuance has become easy. Wrapping a treasury bill or a stock into a token requires technical work, not a market miracle. Creating a liquid secondary market demands market makers, regulatory clarity, interoperable venues and genuine demand from traders who want to buy and sell continuously.

Those pieces do not exist yet for most RWAs. The Tokenization Preparedness Index, which Pantera introduced to measure how natively an asset operates on-chain, scored just 2.04 out of a possible higher range across the sample. Most assets are simple wrappers, not native instruments.

Look at where actual trading activity concentrates. Tokenized stock perpetual futures on platforms like Hyperliquid generated $67.8 billion in June volume, 16 times the spot market for the underlying tokens. Traders prefer derivatives because they offer leverage, easier shorting and liquidity from concentrated market-making.

The spot tokens themselves remain thin. This pattern mirrors how crypto markets developed for native assets, and it suggests the RWA spot market will eventually catch up. It also confirms that the spot market isn't where the action is right now.

Adoption Is Real, but Depth Remains Limited

I believe the run is real. Tokenization solves genuine problems around settlement speed, fractional ownership and 24/7 access. The IMF found that more than 50% of tokenized equity trading occurs outside traditional market hours and that roughly 80% of the analysed trades were for fewer than one share, suggesting retail investors are using these products to access opportunities they could not otherwise access.

That is meaningful adoption. But meaningful adoption of a product does not equal deep, reliable liquidity. A user who buys a fractional share and holds it contributes to the holder count without adding to market depth.

I like @chameleon_jeff's reply about tokenized stocks: "Overrated."He is speaking my language.This panel was at Token2049 in Singapore. Panelists include @StaniKulechov, @gdog97_, and @hosseeb.Sharing my article soon. https://t.co/3xL4Mx3ZXl

— Anndy Lian (@anndylian) October 14, 2026

A more sustainable version of this sector, which I expect to see within two to three years, will look different. Open-access tokens will dominate trading, not permissioned ones. RWAs will find routine use as collateral in DeFi lending, a trend already visible on platforms like Morpho, where private credit leads utilisation.

Market makers will build hybrid venues that connect centralised exchange order books with on-chain pools. Clearer regulation in major jurisdictions will reduce the friction that currently keeps assets locked behind whitelists. The Tokenization Preparedness Index will rise as products become more native and less wrapper-like.

The Next Run Needs Better Market Structure

The current phase is a beginning, and beginnings are messy. As Jeff Yan from Hyperliquid put it: "Overrated".

I believe the start needs to be better, not because the technology fails, but because the market structure around it has not caught up. When it does, the next run will rest on trading depth rather than holder inflation. That run will last longer and matter more.

This article was written by Anndy Lian at www.financemagnates.com.