Real World Assets, or RWA for short, are physical and financial assets whose ownership or claim is recorded on a blockchain: government bonds, money market funds, corporate loans, gold, real
Real World Assets, or RWA for short, are physical and financial assets whose ownership or claim is recorded on a blockchain: government bonds, money market funds, corporate loans, gold, real estate. The term sounds like a clearly defined asset class, and that is exactly what it is not. We counted the category ourselves on October 23, 2026, and the two most striking findings come first: of the $70.32 billion held in the fifty largest RWA tokens, $26.03 billion sits in a single tokenised credit product from the United States. Another $23.32 billion are not tokenised assets at all, but tokens of the networks that administer such assets.
Anyone reading that the RWA market is worth $70 billion is reading a total made up of two entirely different things. This article takes that total apart, explains the technology behind it and sets out what German law makes of such a token. Because the German Electronic Securities Act treats a crypto security differently from what most people expect.
Tokenisation means that the right to an asset is recorded in an entry on a blockchain instead of in a certificate or a custody statement. The token is not the asset; it is the evidence of a right to it. Whoever holds a tokenised money market fund owns fund units whose register sits on a blockchain. Whoever holds a gold token owns a claim on deposited metal against a custodian.
Three properties follow from this that set RWA tokens apart from bitcoin and ether. First, there is always an issuer standing behind the backing; if the issuer fails, no private key helps. Second, the token is usually restricted in transfer, because the issuer may only distribute to vetted addresses. Third, the issuer can often freeze or claw back tokens, because it controls the asset and the register. How to check those functions on a specific token is something we set out for Solana in September: how to check whether your token can be frozen and clawed back.
That also draws the line to tokenised stocks, which public debate often throws into the same pot as RWA. Tokenised stocks are a special case with their own pitfalls around ownership, and we have written about them separately: why a tokenised stock does not make you a shareholder. This article is about the remaining assets, and that is the larger part of the category.
To arrive at a reliable figure we pulled the fifty largest tokens in the RWA category by market capitalisation from CoinGecko on October 23, 2026 and classified each one individually. The total comes to $70.32 billion. This is how it breaks down:
Group Market capitalisation Share Tokenised credit, largest single position $26.03bn 37.0 percent Infrastructure and platform tokens $23.32bn 33.2 percent Money market and bond funds, eight tokens $11.01bn 15.7 percent Gold, three tokens $5.36bn 7.6 percent Remaining positions $4.60bn 6.5 percentFour groups are therefore enough to account for 93.5 percent of the category. Real estate, which features in every explanation of RWA, does not appear at all in this list of the fifty largest tokens. In the protocol list counted further below, the largest real estate protocol holds $155 million in deposited capital, which is 3.8 percent of $4.10 billion. Anyone who takes RWA for a property investment has read the marketing rather than the figures.
The largest position in the category is called Figure Heloc and comes to $26.03 billion. Behind it, according to the provider's own description, sit tokenised credit claims, above all HELOC loans, that is credit lines secured by residential property in the American market, together with corporate loans. They are recorded on the Provenance Blockchain and traded through the platforms of the same house.
This concentration is the most important finding of the count. A single product from a single provider in a single country carries more than a third of what is presented as a global asset class. For an investor in Germany, one sober reading follows: the headline about the growth of tokenisation describes, to a large extent, the growth of an American lending business to which retail investors here have no access anyway. If that one position rises or falls, the figure for the whole category moves, without anything having changed in the other products.
A more reliable view is therefore the one on the groups an investor can actually reach. Those are the money market and bond funds and the gold tokens, together $16.37 billion, or 23.3 percent.
The register of a tokenised bond sits in a data centre, the claim on it with the issuer.
$23.32 billion of the category, or 33.2 percent, falls to tokens that do not themselves represent any real asset. They include the network and platform tokens Chainlink at $9.20 billion, Stellar at $6.19 billion, Quant at $2.68 billion and Ondo at $2.09 billion, plus Algorand, Injective, XDC Network and several smaller ones.
These tokens belong close to the subject, and rightly so, because the networks named supply price data, settlement or registers for tokenised assets. As an investment, though, they are something else. A money market fund token moves with the interest rate and the value of its paper; a platform token moves with the crypto market. Whoever adds the two together mixes an interest-bearing claim with a growth bet and arrives at a figure that serves neither question.
When reading any RWA statistic it is therefore worth asking what exactly was counted. Market capitalisation of the tokens in a category, assets under management of the funds behind them and capital deposited in protocols are three different measures, and they diverge widely.
We repeated the same check on October 23 on the protocol side. The RWA category on DefiLlama lists 187 protocols holding $4.10 billion in deposited capital between them. That is less than a sixteenth of the $70.3 billion above, and the difference is not a contradiction but a different measurement.
The market capitalisation of a token counts every issued unit at the latest price. The deposited capital of a protocol counts only what currently sits in its contracts. A tokenised fund from BlackRock or Invesco therefore appears at its full volume in the first figure, but in the second only to the extent that it is deployed in one of the protocols recorded. The largest positions in the protocol list are correspondingly small: $477 million at the biggest, $460 million and $375 million at the next two.
Deposited capital, often referred to as total value locked or TVL, is the sum of the values sitting in a protocol's contracts. For RWA the metric is weak for a further reason: a fund whose units simply sit in wallets and are never lent out or pledged generates no TVL at all. That does not make it any smaller.
More interesting than the total is where these protocols run. Our count of the same list by blockchain produces a clear ranking: Ethereum 62 protocols, Base 22, Polygon 16, the BNB blockchain 15, Solana 14, Arbitrum 13, Avalanche 9 and Monad 6. Many protocols run on several blockchains at once, which is why the figures add up to more than 187.
In practice this means two things. Anyone who wants to use RWA products cannot get past Ethereum and its layer-2 networks, and the transaction costs of those networks belong in the calculation. And a product that exists on only one, little-used blockchain carries the risk of that blockchain on top, not only the risk of its issuer.
The economically most important group in the category are tokenised funds holding short-dated government paper and money market instruments. Eight such tokens appear in our count, together $11.01 billion. The ranking on October 23, 2026:
Token Product Market capitalisation USYC Money market product from Circle $2.38bn USDY Ondo US Dollar Yield $2.37bn BUIDL BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund $2.18bn EURSAFO Spiko Amundi Overnight Swap Fund, in euro $1.76bn USTB Invesco Short Duration US Government $0.73bn JAAA Janus Henderson Anemoy AAA CLO Fund $0.58bn EUTBL Spiko EU T-Bills Money Market Fund $0.53bn YLDS YLDS $0.49bnTwo things stand out here. First, the largest positions are not backed by crypto companies but by fund houses with decades of history: BlackRock, Invesco, Janus Henderson, and through Spiko also Amundi. Second, two of the eight positions are denominated in euro and set up in the European Union, namely the two Spiko funds with $2.29 billion between them. For investors here that is the most relevant part of the whole category, because a money market fund authorised in the EU brings different rules and a different currency than a US Treasury product. The provider describes its product range on its own site: Spiko, money market funds in euro, dollar, pound and franc.
The character of these products remains important. A money market fund token promises no price gains; it passes on the running interest of the paper it holds, less costs. If the policy rate falls, the return falls. And access is usually restricted: many of these funds are open only to professional investors, with minimum investments far above what a retail investor puts to work.
The second reachable group are gold tokens: $5.36 billion, split between Tether Gold at $3.23 billion, PAX Gold at $1.77 billion and Kinesis Gold at $0.35 billion. Each of these tokens represents a quantity of physical gold held by a custodian; on October 23 the prices stood at around $3,997 and $4,006 per unit, which is the price of a troy ounce.
The difference between a gold bar in a safe deposit box and a physically backed gold ETC in a securities account does not lie in the metal but in the chain of parties involved. With a gold token, the claim depends on the terms of issue and on the custodian, and physical delivery, where it is provided for at all, is tied to minimum quantities and fees. In return the token is transferable around the clock and divisible into small fractions, which a bar is not. Both are real advantages and real risks, and neither replaces reading the terms of issue.
One tax point often gets lost: in Germany, gains from gold tokens are not automatically treated like gains from physical gold. The classification depends on the legal construction of the token, and that determines whether a holding period applies or withholding tax falls due. Anyone holding several such positions needs clean records of every movement; which programmes manage that for the German market is something we have compared: crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers compared.
Real estate features in every explanation of Real World Assets and almost not at all in the figures.
This is where it becomes concrete for investors in Germany, and German law is further along here than many assume. The Electronic Securities Act, eWpG for short, has been in force since 2021. Under section 2 subsection 1 a security may also be issued electronically, namely by the issuer effecting an entry in an electronic securities register instead of producing a certificate. Subsection 2 makes clear that such a security has the same legal effect as a security in certificated form.
Subsection 3 carries particular consequences: an electronic security "is deemed to be a thing within the meaning of section 90 of the German Civil Code". That brings the rules on ownership and possession of things into play, and from them follows how ownership passes and who can acquire in good faith. For a pure crypto token without that basis, none of this applies.
Section 4 subsection 1 eWpG distinguishes two kinds of register: central registers under section 12 and crypto securities registers under section 16. A crypto security, under section 4 subsection 3, is an electronic security entered in a crypto securities register. Only in that form is a token a security in the legal sense in Germany. Everything else that looks like a security and sits on a blockchain is legally something different, with different consequences for ownership and insolvency.
Section 16 subsection 1 eWpG describes what such a register has to deliver technically: it is "to be kept on a tamper-proof recording system in which data are logged in chronological order and stored in a manner protected against unauthorised deletion and subsequent alteration". The law does not prescribe a particular blockchain; it describes properties.
Subsection 2 governs responsibility, and that is where the sentence sits that surprises investors. The register-keeping entity is whoever the issuer names as such towards the holder; if no such designation is made, the issuer itself is deemed to be the register-keeping entity. And further: "A change of the register-keeping entity by the issuer is permissible without the consent of the holder or the beneficiary, unless the terms of issue, or in the case of shares the articles of association of the stock corporation, provide otherwise." The issuer can therefore swap out the entity that records your ownership, and you do not have to agree. You have a say only where the terms of issue expressly grant you one.
Anyone keeping a crypto securities register commercially needs authorisation from BaFin; the activity is listed as a financial service in section 1 subsection 1a sentence 2 number 8 of the German Banking Act. The supervisor has published its interpretation: BaFin guidance notice 03/2023 on keeping crypto securities registers. An issuer putting out a German crypto security cannot hand the register-keeping to just anyone.
All three properties from the beginning converge on the same point. An RWA token is a claim, and a claim is only as good as the debtor. Concretely that means: if the issuer goes insolvent, the insolvency proceedings decide, along with the question of whether the asset was held separately and insolvency-remote; the blockchain decides nothing about it. If the technical platform fails, the token in your own wallet does not help, because redemption runs through the issuer. And if an address is frozen, the token still exists but can no longer be transferred.
With regulated products, these freeze and clawback functions are not a defect but a precondition: a fund house that made its units transferable to any address whatsoever could not meet its anti-money-laundering obligations. For investors, though, it means that the familiar rule of self-custody does not apply here. The private key protects against third-party access; it does not protect against the issuer.
All of this can be examined before buying. Three questions are enough for a first assessment: who is the issuer, and under whose supervision does it stand? Where does the asset sit, and is it separated from the issuer's own assets? What conditions apply to redemption, at what price and with what notice period? If the answer to one of those questions is nowhere to be found, the product cannot be assessed.
The sober state of play for retail investors in Germany looks like this. The large tokenised funds in the category are predominantly reserved for institutional investors, with minimum investments on a scale that rules retail investors out. Gold tokens are available on several trading venues authorised in the European Union. Tokenised credit, the largest position in the category, is practically inaccessible. Access via infrastructure tokens such as Chainlink or Stellar is open, but it tracks the growth of tokenisation only indirectly and carries the full price risk of a crypto token.
Anyone moving in this field therefore checks the trading venue first. Authorisation under the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets says who is supervised and what duties the provider has; which platforms come into question for these assets is something we have put together in a separate overview of exchanges for Real World Assets and tokenised stocks. The running costs and the custody arrangements of individual providers differ considerably and belong in a comparison before the first purchase.
A total loss is possible with every one of these products, including a tokenised fund, and that is because of the technology, the issuer and the platform standing between the investor and the asset. Those layers are the price of the advantages of tokenisation, and they belong in every calculation.
The figure circulating about Real World Assets describes something other than an asset class: 33.2 percent of the category are infrastructure tokens, and 37.0 percent hangs on a single American credit product. What remains are the funds and the gold, and those can be examined. Three steps follow from this:
(As of October 23, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
