Tokenisation today is one of the hottest topics in financial markets. A report by CoinGecko shows how the tokenised real world asset (RWA) market has tripled over the previous year, reaching $19 billion and above by the first quarter of 2026.

Almost every other week, there are new announcements about private credit funds, real estate, or other traditionally illiquid assets moving onto blockchain infrastructure. One of the more recent stand-out examples came when Tradable announced its intention to tokenise up to $1 billion in private credit assets on Stellar. 

More private assets are finding their way on-chain. And it’s not hard to see the reasons for this trend’s booming growth either: tokenisation can make assets once reserved for institutional participants or HNWIs available to a much broader audience. Between fractional ownership of assets lowering barriers to entry and on-chain infrastructure, simplifying transfers, there are many layers of operational friction that tokenisation removes. 

For wealth managers, this creates new opportunities in what they can offer to their clients. But there is an important distinction that we need to look at here: making an asset more accessible is not the same as making it liquid.

That’s a tidbit that I believe has often been lost in discussions, since a lot of them focused on issuance questions for a long time. But this is just the first stage of development for this market. So what comes afterwards?

Having a token doesn’t automatically give you a market
Once it’s tokenised, a private equity fund or a piece of commercial property may technically become available for trading 24/7. But the follow-up problem is that buyers, sellers, competitive pricing, or meaningful trading activity around these assets do not spring up out of nowhere. It takes more to make markets liquid than just placing the underlying assets on blockchain rails.

I believe that this is one of the defining challenges that the industry needs to tackle in its next phase of evolution. Today, the number of tokenised assets is growing much faster than the infrastructure needed to support them. Even major financial institutions such as the European Central Bank and Citi have previously commented that secondary market trading is happening to an “insufficient” extent.

With that in mind, liquidity is at risk of becoming increasingly fragmented as more assets are being brought on-chain. Instead of a handful of genuinely useful and actively traded instruments, the market could end up with thousands of tokenised assets, each with only a tiny pool of participants. 

Naturally, this makes price discovery much harder. That’s before we recall that private markets have always faced challenges in this regard, as assets here are typically priced periodically (rather than continuously) and transactions happen much more infrequently compared with private markets. 

Simply issuing tokens does not eliminate these fundamental issues. If anything, the contrast becomes more visible, since investors actively gain the ability to trade more frequently, but reliable market prices remain out of reach.

Why liquidity matters more as institutions enter the picture
As institutional participation grows, finding a solution to this problem becomes even more important. Large investors are unlikely to allocate any serious capital to markets where prices are difficult to verify or where even the ability to exit a position at all remains uncertain. As such, liquidity should be considered a prerequisite for institutional adoption.

This is why we need to place greater attention to building market infrastructure around tokenised assets. Matching buyers and sellers and enabling efficient price formation, all while also supporting compliance standards desired by large-scale players, is not simple to achieve.

In some ways, tokenisation counts more as the beginning of a much larger process rather than the final objective.

The potential of programmable ownership
Here’s another area of tokenisation that I believe deserves more attention than it is getting at the moment.

We have learned how to convert RWAs to tokens and place them on blockchain rails, but arguably an even greater opportunity comes from this technology’s ability to make ownership itself more dynamic.

Certain actions that require multiple intermediaries can become completely automated when smart contracts are brought into the equation. Ownership transfers and compliance restrictions, for example, could all be embedded directly into the asset itself. 

Imagine, for example, tokens that would restrict ownership and transactions only to investors who meet specific criteria. Or distribute income to holders according to their ownership share. Or, for something different, how inheritance processes could be streamlined, with tokens automatically transferring to heirs once predefined legal conditions were met.

Instead of treating ownership records and rules governing that ownership as separate entities, blockchain makes it possible to combine both into a single programmable framework. For wealth managers, this could drastically change the way that private assets are administered.

Infrastructure must reflect financial reality
But as fascinating as this vision is, it can only be successful if tokenisation reflects the realities of traditional financial markets. As we covered earlier, it’s not enough to simply bring an asset on-chain and expect it to work “just like that.” 

Private assets don’t operate in the same way as cryptocurrencies. They come with their own set of legal rights, restrictions, obligations, and investor rules. Who can own them, how they can be transferred, what rights investors have, and even when they can realistically be traded are all defined by long-standing regulations and market practices. All these are essential parts of how these markets function, and tokenisation doesn't fundamentally change any of it. 

If anything, to be effective, blockchain infrastructure needs to accommodate these realities, rather than trying to work around them and force traditional assets into models originally not designed for them.

This is why I am confident that when the industry comes close to completing tokenisation infrastructure in earnest, it will look very different from what we have today.

The core question is no longer whether a particular asset can be issued on-chain. That has already been answered. The next step is determining whether an efficient market can develop around it. Can liquidity providers support trading at scale? Can secondary markets produce reliable prices? Can programmable ownership and compliance requirements be integrated directly into trading infrastructure?

Devising answers to these questions will determine in what manner (and how soon) tokenisation will take its place as a new layer of global capital markets. Ultimately, the goal is to make sure it transforms private investing instead of simply digitising it.