Don’t you hate it when your WhatsApp message arrives after two days because it first has to be authenticated, stamped, and cleared through three different stages? In other words, they expect communication to occur in real time. So why don’t we have the same expectations for financial markets?
In this day and age, exchanging one stock for another still traditionally means selling, waiting for settlement, and then buying again. But tokenized stocks could change the game.
Tokenization trends
Tokenized stocks entered the mainstream conversation following the landmark SpaceX IPO, the largest initial public offering in history at $75 billion. In the days that followed, blockchain-based platforms began offering tokenized exposure to SpaceX alongside other big names such as Nvidia, Google, and Strategy, demonstrating the growing demand for blockchain-native access to traditional assets.
At the same time, Nasdaq sought regulatory approval from the SEC to facilitate trading of tokenized securities on its exchange, emphasizing that the transition is no longer limited to crypto-native platforms. What was long considered an emerging concept is now increasingly becoming part of the broader market infrastructure discussion.
Tokenized stocks are simply stocks that exist on the blockchain. Same company, same value, same rights as shares purchased through a broker. What changes is how you move. They can be traded at any time, settled in seconds, segmented to make them accessible to more people, and transferred across borders without the many layers that traditional securities rely on.
While equities continue to dominate the tokenization story, the momentum is spreading to other asset classes, with private credit now valued at over $10 billion on-chain, up from about $5 billion a year ago, according to RWA.xyz. Real estate, commodities, and structured debt are also gradually moving on-chain, reflecting nascent but increasing institutional investor participation in markets long constrained by high entry thresholds and traditional infrastructure.
Together, these asset classes represent hundreds of trillions of dollars in global value.
However, not all blockchains are built for institutional payments. Many companies are prioritizing open market activities where the trade-off between fee volatility and variable settlement times is acceptable.
How will this market trend expand in the future?
However, regulated tokenization requires predictable fees, deterministic payments, and bank-level infrastructure, features for which most public blockchains were not designed. In that respect, $XDC The Network focused on this infrastructure, enabling institutional-level tokenization long before tokenized stocks gained mainstream attention.
$XDC The network has processed over $1.1 billion in tokenized receivables, private credit, and products, reflecting years of institutional adoption. In Brazil, for example, Liqi Digital Assets reports that cumulative tokenized credit operations will reach R$1.2 billion (approximately US$230 million) by early 2026, including R$600 million (approximately US$115 million) settled in January and February alone.
Atul Kekade, co-founder of $XDC network,
The conversation around tokenization has been dominated by assets that were already easy to move. The more difficult problems are those that were inaccessible to begin with. Those markets are orders of magnitude more valuable, and the infrastructure gap is the only thing standing between here and there. We are at the beginning, not the end, of a decade of true tokenization.
BCG and Ripple predict that the tokenized asset market will reach $18.9 trillion by 2033. Standard Chartered aims to expand its market to $30 trillion by 2034, including cross-border credit. The gap between this number and today is almost entirely a matter of infrastructure. It’s a question of which network can handle the volume of markets not yet on-chain, compliance requirements, and organizational expectations.
The regulatory environment is also moving in a supportive direction. Brazil, Singapore, the UK, and the EU have each established legal frameworks that give formal status to tokenized financial products. The US GENIUS Act, passed in July 2025, created a federal infrastructure for stablecoin payments. The focus is no longer on whether tokenization is allowed, but on how quickly it can be deployed at scale.
SpaceX’s IPO gave everyone a moment to point to tokenization. But the infrastructure to make it work at scale wasn’t built within weeks of the headlines.
It was built over many years in a part of the market that never made the news. That’s what will underpin the next decade of finance.
