Wouldn’t you hate it when a WhatsApp message arrived two days later? Because first it had to be verified, stamped and cleaned through three different stages. So we expect communication to be real time. So why shouldn’t we have the same expectations from our financial markets?
Today, swapping one stock for another still traditionally means selling, waiting for settlement, and only then buying again. But tokenized stocks may be changing that.
Tokenization trend
Tokenized stocks entered the mainstream discussion following the landmark SpaceX IPO, which became the largest IPO in history at $75 billion. In the days that followed, blockchain-based platforms began offering tokenized access to SpaceX alongside other high-profile names like Nvidia, Google, and Strategy, signaling growing demand for blockchain-based access to traditional assets.
At the same time, NASDAQ sought regulatory approval from the SEC to facilitate the trading of tokenized securities on its exchange, underlining that this exchange is no longer limited to crypto-native platforms. What has long been considered an emerging concept is now increasingly becoming part of broader market infrastructure discussions.
A tokenized stock is simply a stock that lives on a blockchain. Same company, same value, same rights as any stock you would buy through a broker. What changes is how it moves. It can be bought and sold at any hour, exchanged in seconds, broken into smaller pieces to make it accessible to more people, and transferred across borders without the many layers that traditional securities rely on.
While equities continue to dominate the tokenization discourse, momentum is expanding in other asset classes, with private loans surpassing $10 billion on-chain, according to RWA.xyz. Real estate, commodities and structured debt are also slowly moving on the chain; This reflects early but growing institutional participation in markets that have long been constrained by high entry thresholds and legacy infrastructure.
Together, these asset classes represent hundreds of trillions of dollars in global value.
But not all blockchains are designed for institutional settlement. Many prioritize open market operations, where wage fluctuations and variable payment terms are acceptable trade-offs.
How will this market trend scale in the future?
However, regulated tokenization requires predictable fees, deterministic payment, and banking-grade infrastructure; capabilities that most public blockchains were not designed for. XDC Network focused on this infrastructure and enabled institutional tokenization long before tokenized stocks attracted mainstream attention.
XDC Network has processed more than $1.1 billion in tokenized receivables, private loans and commodities, reflecting years of institutional adoption. In Brazil, for example, Liqi Digital Assets reported BRL1.2 billion (about $230 million) in cumulative tokenized credit operations in early 2026; this includes BRL600 million (about US$115 million) paid in January and February alone.
According to Atul Khekade, Co-Founder of XDC Network,
The tokenization debate has been dominated by assets that are already easy to move. The more difficult problem is the ones that were never accessible to begin with. These markets are much more valuable and the only thing standing between here and there is the infrastructure gap. We are at the beginning, not the end, of the true tokenization decade.
BCG and Ripple predict that the tokenized asset market will reach $18.9 trillion by 2033. Standard Chartered will increase this figure to $30 trillion by 2034 when cross-border loans are included. The distance between these figures and today is almost entirely a matter of infrastructure. It’s a question of which networks can meet the volume, compliance requirements, and enterprise expectations of markets that haven’t yet gone on-chain.
The regulatory environment is also moving to support this. Brazil, Singapore, the UK, and the EU have each established legal frameworks that provide official status for tokenized financial instruments. The US GENIUS Act, passed in July 2025, created the federal infrastructure for payment stablecoins. The focus is no longer on whether tokenization should be allowed, but on how quickly it can be adopted at scale.
SpaceX’s IPO gave tokenization a moment everyone can point to. But the infrastructure to make this work at scale wasn’t built in the weeks after the headline.
It has been built over the years in parts of the market that have never been heard of. The next decade of finance will continue like this.
