Tokenized real-world assets, ordinary financial instruments like Treasury bills, money-market funds, and corporate bonds represented as blockchain tokens rather than traditional book-entry securities, crossed roughly $31 billion on public blockchains in 2026, according to tracking firm rwa.xyz, up more than 400 percent since early 2025 and up from just $5 billion in 2022. For a category that spent years as a crypto-industry talking point with little institutional follow-through, that growth curve marks a real shift from pilot programs to production infrastructure that large financial institutions are actually routing money through.
BlackRock is the clearest example. Its BUIDL fund, a tokenized money-market fund that gives investors on-chain exposure to short-term Treasuries and repurchase agreements, surpassed $2.5 billion in assets in 2026, and chief executive Larry Fink has repeatedly described tokenization as, in his words, the next generation for markets. What makes BUIDL more than just a large tokenized fund is what happened to it in late April, when Standard Chartered, BlackRock, and the crypto exchange OKX jointly launched a framework letting qualified investors use BUIDL shares directly as trading collateral, sometimes described in the industry as a yield stack: an investor holds BUIDL, earns the underlying Treasury yield on it, and simultaneously posts the same tokenized shares as margin for a separate trading position, extracting value from the same capital twice in a way that would require far more operational friction using traditional custody and settlement rails.
That collateral use case is the actual unlock, more than the tokenization itself. Turning a Treasury bill into a blockchain token was never technically difficult; the hard part has always been getting institutions comfortable treating that token as functionally equivalent to the underlying asset for purposes like margin, settlement finality, and regulatory capital treatment. Standard Chartered and BlackRock jointly vouching for BUIDL as usable collateral is a much stronger institutional signal than any amount of tokenization volume alone, because it means a regulated bank is willing to accept the token, not just the concept, inside its own risk framework.
BlackRock isn’t operating in isolation here. JPMorgan and Franklin Templeton have both built out competing tokenized fund products, and the broader industry narrative has shifted from asking whether large financial institutions would eventually embrace tokenization to asking how quickly the plumbing connecting tokenized assets to traditional custody, clearing, and collateral systems can be built out. That plumbing question is also what’s driving the wave of crypto M&A this year, deals like Bullish’s $4.2 billion acquisition of transfer agent Equiniti are explicitly aimed at building exactly this kind of infrastructure bridge rather than building new tokenized products from scratch.
The catch, and it’s a significant one, is that most of this activity so far serves institutions that already had efficient access to Treasuries and money-market funds through conventional channels. A large asset manager or hedge fund doesn’t gain access to an entirely new asset class by using tokenized BUIDL as collateral, it gains marginal operational efficiency on an asset it could already buy easily. The more genuinely transformative use case, tokenization providing fractional, low-minimum access to asset classes that were previously locked behind high minimums or geographic restrictions, real estate, private credit, foreign equities, is still mostly in pilot stage even at the institutions leading the charge.
That gap between institutional efficiency gains and genuine access expansion is exactly where the Philippines has staked out an unusually specific position. The Philippine SEC has publicly signaled it sees RWA tokenization primarily as a tool for overseas Filipino workers who have savings but limited access to diversified investment options, framing fractional tokenized real estate and tokenized US equity access as a way to break the geographic and minimum-investment barriers that keep OFW capital parked in low-yield savings accounts or, worse, funneled into investment scams. That’s a meaningfully different framing than BlackRock’s institutional-collateral pitch, and if the Philippine SEC’s regulatory sandbox testing actually produces a working product, it would put the Philippines ahead of most G7 markets on the access side of tokenization, even while trailing badly on the institutional-infrastructure side that BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Standard Chartered are currently building out. Whether Philippine regulators can turn that stated intent into an actual licensed product before the institutional players simply extend their existing tokenized fund lineups into Southeast Asia themselves is the real race worth watching over the next year.
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