The tokenization market reached $19.32 billion in the first quarter of 2026. Of 593, only 2.7% of tokenized assets reach the “native” level of maturity. The vast majority of tokenized assets are just digital copies, “receipts” of assets that exist in infrastructures outside of cryptocurrency accounting networks. This is the main finding of Pantera Capital in its recent report on the state of tokenization in the first quarter of 2026. According to the firm’s research director, today blockchains only serve to distribute or display tokenized assets more quickly and visibly, but They fail to replace traditional infrastructure or introduce the native qualities of Bitcoin-inspired technology..
Today it’s less about reinventing on-chain finance, and more about distributing familiar products over new rails. This resembles the early internet phase of “newspaper-on-a-website”: assets distributed on new rails, but still largely limited by off-chain processes and infrastructure. Danning, director of research at Pantera Capital
The conclusions on the current state of tokenized assets report are supported by the Tokenization Progress Index (TPI), an instrument created by Pantera Capital that measures how close we are to real-world assetssuch as stocks and traditional investment goods, move completely to on-chain infrastructures. Specifically, the instrument measures three dimensions or factors of on-chain “maturity”: Issuance and Redemption, Transferability and Settlement, and Complexity and Compossibility. The index assigns each dimension a score on a scale of 1 to 5 to create a composite TPI score.
What does the data say about the maturity of tokenization?
According to the results of the application of the index that tracks 593 assets throughout the tokenization market (whose total value is 320.6 billion dollars), only 2.7% of tokenized assets reach the “native” level of maturity. 77.6% of tracked assets fall into the “wrapper” category, or wrapped digital token, so that it can operate on a “blockchain” without changing its basic legal or financial nature. On the other hand, 11.1% qualify as «hybrid», or that they combine traditional and native characteristics. The market for tokenized real-world assets (RWA, excluding stablecoins) reached $19.32 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2026, following a growth of 256.7% from $5.42 billion at the beginning of 2025, as reported by CoinGecko.
Tokenization: Bitcoin technology applied without sovereignty
What this data demonstrates is that almost all tokenizations in the market have traditional administrators or custodians, such as BlackRock, which They continue to control who can mint, redeem and burn a token.
«The vast majority of what we call ‘tokenization’ today is nothing more than digitized traditional paper. It is a 1:1 replica of traditional finance with a receipt on the blockchain.» Pantera Capital, asset management company.
In practice, the current state of tokenization means for the end user that he does not have true custody or sovereignty rights over his assets.
Tokenized assets—bonds, credit or real estate—continue to be held in custody by banks or firms such as BlackRock and BNY Mellon. Redeeming or using tokens as collateral still requires manual approval from the issuer, which involves counterparty risks, blocks, freezes and frictions common to traditional finance.
