Author: RWA Research Institute

In March 2026, a set of data sparked widespread attention in the digital asset industry. According to data from RWA.xyz, as of March 8, the total on-chain value of tokenized real-world assets (RWA), excluding stablecoins, has exceeded $25 billion. This figure has grown nearly fourfold from about $6.4 billion a year ago, with a year-on-year increase of 289%.

Almost simultaneously, a series of actions from traditional financial giants surfaced. BlackRock expanded its tokenized fund BUIDL to five public chains including Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon, making this fund the largest publicly traded blockchain tokenized money market fund. JPMorgan, on the other hand, renamed its blockchain division Onyx to Kinexys, marking a shift from the "exploration of blockchain" to "scalable applications" for this global leading financial institution.

These seemingly independent events point to the same conclusion: RWA is crossing a historic critical point from "proof of concept" to "scalable deployment."

The on-chain scale of six major asset classes, including U.S. Treasury bonds, commodities, private credit, institutional alternative investment funds, corporate bonds, and non-U.S. government debt, has all surpassed $1 billion. This is no longer a testing ground for fringe innovators, but a new battlefield where mainstream financial institutions are casting votes with real money. The market value of $25 billion represents both the cumulative results of exploration over the past few years and the starting point for an explosion in the next decade.

1. The Six Major Assets "Blooming Everywhere"

The maturation of any market requires a transition from a single category-driven model to a multi-structured support system. The RWA market is undergoing this process.

According to data from RWA.xyz, the current growth of on-chain tokenized assets does not rely on a single dominant asset class. U.S. Treasury bonds and commodities still account for the largest segments, totaling over 58% with a total scale exceeding $16 billion. However, at the same time, the scale of private credit, institutional alternative investment funds, corporate bonds, and non-U.S. government debt has also crossed the $1 billion threshold. Data shows that the concentration of top assets has decreased by 61% over the past year, indicating that market competition is intensifying with more asset types finding suitable tokenization pathways.

The tokenization of U.S. Treasury bonds provides a on-chain yield tool for global investors. Taking BlackRock's BUIDL fund as an example, this fund invests 100% of its total assets in cash, U.S. Treasury bonds, and repurchase agreements, allowing investors to earn dollar returns while holding tokens on the blockchain. As of early March, BUIDL's market capitalization reached $517 million.

The tokenization of commodities is represented by Tether Gold and Paxos Gold, with on-chain scales reaching $2.96 billion and $2.56 billion, respectively. These assets combine the stability of physical gold with the programmability of blockchain, providing new allocation choices for investors.

The tokenization of private credit and institutional alternative investment funds represents a deeper structural change. The traditional private credit market is characterized by information opacity, poor liquidity, and high barriers to entry, while tokenization can divide these assets into smaller shares and enable automated yield distribution through smart contracts. Ondo Finance's on-chain asset scale has exceeded $2 billion, with some assets based on yield products built on BlackRock's BUIDL.

Analysts at Bernstein noted in a report that the tokenized funds launched by traditional financial institutions like BlackRock are "bringing legitimacy" to public smart contract chains like Ethereum. This legitimacy is reflected not only at the technical level but also in regulatory recognition and institutional trust. When the world's largest asset management companies choose to issue products on public chains and when traditional banks' blockchain divisions begin handling billions of dollars in real transactions, RWA is no longer a concept that needs to prove itself, but rather a market that is being realized.

2. BlackRock and JPMorgan are Casting Trust Votes with Real Money

If 2024 to 2025 marks the phase of traditional financial institutions "paying attention to RWA", then 2026 signifies their official transition from "observers" to "participants".

BlackRock's strategy is the most typical. After launching the spot Bitcoin ETF, this asset management company, managing over $11 trillion, accelerated its expansion into the tokenized asset space. Its BUIDL fund, launched in cooperation with Securitize, was initially issued only on Ethereum but has now expanded to five public chains including Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon. Notably, the management fee for BUIDL on Aptos, Avalanche, and Polygon is just 20 basis points, below the 50 basis points on other chains, with this cost difference being subsidized by the relevant public chain foundations. This detail reflects the active effort of the public chain ecosystem to attract traditional assets, while traditional assets seek the underlying infrastructure that best fits them.

More notably, BlackRock's exploration in the DeFi realm is noteworthy. In February of this year, BlackRock introduced its BUIDL fund to the UniswapX trading platform via Securitize, allowing investors to achieve near-instant exchanges between BUIDL and USDC on this decentralized trading system. At the same time, BlackRock also made a strategic investment in UNI tokens, marking the largest asset management company's first direct entry into a DeFi protocol. Robert Mitchnick, Global Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock, commented on this collaboration: “This is an important step in the integration of tokenized assets with decentralized finance.”

JPMorgan's transition is also emblematic. Earlier this year, the bank rebranded its blockchain department from Onyx to Kinexys, expressly shifting its strategic focus from “exploration” to “scalable applications.” According to The Asian Banker, the daily transaction value processed by the Kinexys platform has exceeded $2 billion, with cumulative transaction volume surpassing $15 trillion. Its core product, JPM Coin, has been renamed Kinexys Digital Payment, supporting on-chain settlements in U.S. dollars and euros, aiming to reduce foreign exchange settlement risks and accelerate cross-border transactions.

In the repo market, Kinexys has developed a distributed ledger repo platform in collaboration with Broadridge Financial Solutions, processing tokenized repo transactions exceeding $1 trillion monthly. This figure far exceeds most expectations and demonstrates the practical value of blockchain technology in transforming traditional financial market infrastructures. Toh Wee Kee, Global Business Architecture Head at JPMorgan Kinexys, emphasized in an interview that Kinexys's strategic direction is to collaboratively build an interconnected financial ecosystem with industry partners, enhancing transparency, efficiency, and regulatory compliance through blockchain technology.

Franklin Templeton has also migrated its U.S. government money market fund FOBXX to the Solana public chain, becoming one of the earliest traditional asset management companies to embrace high-performance public chains. The Solana network currently boasts a record 163,000 RWA holders, with institutions like Electric Capital and Goldman Sachs allocating over $240 million to Solana-related products. These data indicate that the participation of traditional financial institutions in RWA is no longer limited to a few pioneers but is forming a collective trend.

3. From "Institutional Game" to "Mass Participation," the Number of Asset Holders Hits a New High

The growth of market scale is accompanied by an expansion in the number of participants. Data from Token Terminal shows that the number of RWA asset holders has reached new highs across major public chains.

The number of RWA asset holders on Ethereum has reached 169,000, followed closely by Solana with 163,000, and Celo and BNB Chain recording 77,000 and 42,000, respectively. Other public chains like Base and Arbitrum One also show significant growth. As of early March, the total number of RWA asset holders exceeded 663,000, an increase of 4% from before. Meanwhile, the number of stablecoin holders has grown to 233 million, marking a 5% increase.

The growth in the number of holders is significant. It indicates that the investor structure of RWA is spreading from the early "insiders" to a broader group. When hundreds of thousands of independent addresses hold tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds or private credit shares, these assets are no longer exclusive to a few institutions but represent a true decentralization of ownership.

This decentralization is precisely one of the core characteristics that distinguishes RWA from traditional finance. In traditional markets, investing in U.S. Treasury bonds or private funds requires meeting high entry thresholds, and liquidity is limited. In the on-chain market, these assets can be divided into smaller units and transferred instantaneously through smart contracts, with holders spread across the globe. Of course, current entry restrictions still exist—such as BlackRock BUIDL requiring investors to be accredited purchasers with a minimum investment of $5 million—but these are more limitations of regulatory requirements rather than technical capabilities. With the improvement of the regulatory framework and the evolution of product design, entry thresholds are expected to gradually decrease.

Data also shows that currently, only about 12% of RWA-backed stablecoins have entered the DeFi realm. This indicates that the majority of RWA assets are still primarily held by institutions, with a low penetration rate in DeFi. This both signifies that there is still immense space for the integration of RWA and DeFi and indicates that the current growth of RWA is mainly driven by institutional demand rather than speculative funds.

4. $25 Billion Is Just the Beginning, Who Will Drive the Next Wave?

Standing at the $25 billion juncture, it is crucial to ask: What is the core force driving RWA from proof of concept to scalable deployment? Where will future growth come from?

The first force is the gradual clarity of the regulatory framework. In 2026, the three major economies around the world almost simultaneously released regulatory signals. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority officially issued the first batch of licenses for fiat stablecoin issuers in March, including entities like HSBC, Standard Chartered, and OSL. The U.S. OCC proposed a comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins based on the GENIUS Act. The EU's MiCA regulation has long been in effect. As the "blood system" of the RWA ecosystem, the compliance of stablecoins will provide a more solid foundation for the entire market. In China, although Document No. 42 issued by eight departments explicitly states that “RWA tokenization activities are strictly prohibited within the country,” it also reserves a compliant channel for “overseas filing.” This "dual-track approach" offers a relatively clear boundary for domestic enterprises’ overseas RWA business.

The second force is the continuous improvement of infrastructure. On March 6, the tx platform officially launched, merging the Sologenic and Coreum blockchain projects to provide unified infrastructure, compliance layers, and application markets for RWA. The emergence of a unified infrastructure means that RWA projects no longer need to build their technical stack from scratch but can quickly build applications based on standardization. This is similar to the development path of traditional internet—once cloud services like AWS emerged, startups didn’t need to build their own servers and could focus on business innovation. The RWA field is experiencing a similar process.

The third force is the rise of the AI agent economy. Although this article focuses on the RWA market itself, it is important not to overlook that the integration of AI and RWA is creating new demand. Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the NEAR protocol, predicts that the primary users of blockchain in the future will be AI agents. When millions of AI agents need to autonomously manage assets, execute transactions, and obtain returns on-chain, their demand for RWA will be substantial. Circle and Stripe are competing to build stablecoin payment infrastructures for AI agents, while OpenAI and Paradigm have collaborated to launch EVMbench to test AI capabilities in the field of smart contract security. These advancements point in one direction: an on-chain economy composed of AI agents is forming, with RWA poised to be one of the most important asset classes within this economy.

Looking back at March 2026, the evolutionary trajectory of RWA is already clear.

From the "proof of concept" in 2024, to the "emergence of projects" in 2025, and then to the "mainstream entry" in 2026—this path validates the basic law of digital civilization evolution: new technologies always start at the margins and gradually penetrate the center; new markets are always pioneered by a few front-runners and then attract mainstream forces to follow. The $25 billion on-chain value, six major assets breaking through the $1 billion threshold, the comprehensive layouts of BlackRock and JPMorgan, and the number of holders exceeding 660,000—these are no longer characteristics of a niche market, but a sign of an asset class that is maturing.

The RWA Research Institute firmly believes that the A and B sides of digital civilization are indispensable. AI represents the ultimate productivity, allowing assets to be created and operated more efficiently; while RWA and the blockchain technology behind it represent advanced production relations, enabling the ownership of assets to flow within a transparent, fair, and trustworthy framework. When the six major asset classes bloom comprehensively and traditional financial institutions cast votes with real money, we have reason to believe that RWA has crossed the critical point from "proof of concept" to "scalable deployment."

The next question is: Who will become the leader in the next wave? Which asset classes will achieve scaled breakthroughs first? How will the regulatory framework further evolve? These questions do not have standard answers, but they deserve continuous reflection by everyone who pays attention to the evolution of digital civilization.

$25 billion is the answer sheet from the past few years and the starting line for the next decade. This transformation has just begun.

(The data and case studies in this article are sourced from RWA.xyz, The Asian Banker, BlockBeats, Gate News, MEXC News. All foreign cases are based on compliance frameworks in their respective jurisdictions and do not constitute any operational advice for the mainland China market.)

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