Tokenization Briefing: 10 Trillion Dollar Tokenization Market?

The IMF Says Tokenization’s Biggest Constraints Aren’t Technical

On October 8, the IMF published Chapter 3 of its Global Financial Stability Report, “Scaling Tokenization: New Efficiencies, New Vulnerabilities.” It puts publicly reported tokenized assets at about $65 billion as of July, excluding stablecoins and repo. Tokenized credit accounts for $30.4 billion and money market funds for $17.5 billion, while tokenized equities total just $2.3 billion.

Investors are using the features tokenization offers. More than half of tokenized equity trading happens outside traditional market hours, and about 80% of the trades the IMF analyzed were for less than one share.

Tokenized equities were shown to be about 1.5 times as volatile as the underlying assets, with liquidity split across platforms and networks that don’t interoperate.

The IMF also warned about certain risks associated with tokenization. While today’s process of sequence of messaging, trading, delayed settlement, and reconciliation adds cost, it also acts as a sort of a safety buffer. Round-the-clock settlement could lead to “fire sales, liquidity runs, and contagion through interconnectedness and leverage.”

The report advocates for building tokenized collateral carefully. The IMF's constraints are the ones the market is already working through, from the CFTC’s collateral guidance to DTCC’s launch this month. Its warning is that increased speed cuts can have negative effects too, so margin and liquidity safeguards will need to be implemented.

Wall Street’s 2030 Forecasts Need Tokenization to Nearly Triple Every Year

Morgan Stanley’s head of digital asset strategy told The Block on Monday that she expects tokenized assets to reach $3 to $10 trillion by 2030. From about $39 billion today, that implies growth of 2.8 to 3.7 times a year, compared with roughly 1.9 times so far in 2026.

Closing that gap would likely require large pools of traditional assets moving onchain. The infrastructure for this is currently being built out. As those channels open, growth could accelerate rather than follow this year’s line.

Few Large Tokenized Treasury Funds Keep Their Official Records Onchain

Franklin Templeton’s CEO argued at TOKEN2049 that many tokenized funds only mirror ownership records kept offchain. We checked the 12 largest tokenized Treasury products against their public documents. Only Franklin’s BENJI and iBENJI, worth $2.4 billion combined, describe the chain as the record, while filings for WisdomTree’s WTGXX, JPMorgan’s JLTXX and Circle’s USYC say the offchain register is the source of truth. The rest of the funds don’t disclose that information.

That matters for collateral and onchain trading, which work more simply when a token transfer is the legal transfer. We expect more issuers to spell out which record governs as funds compete for those uses.