Tokenized Stocks Surge 2,000% as On-Chain Investors Break the Mold

The total supply of tokenized real-world assets has exceeded $34 billion in 2026, and tokenized stocks have grown more than 2,000% over the past year as active holders surpassed one million, according to a new report from data analytics platform Dune.

Many on Wall Street expected tokenization—the process of turning assets into blockchain-tradable tokens—to amount to little more than reproducing legacy financial products on a digital ledger. Dune's data shows something different: on-chain investors are using the technology to construct an around-the-clock financial system that defies the design of traditional markets.

All major asset categories, including cash equivalents and commodities, have more than doubled over the past year, per Dune. Rather than simply putting familiar products on blockchain rails, on-chain investors are concentrating on individual stocks, trading equities 24/7, and using private credit tokens in decentralized lending.

"The way the market is wired is completely different," Dune CEO Frederik Haga told Fortune. "The whole underlying architecture of these venues [is] different, and so that creates different trading behavior."

The momentum behind tokenization has been building for years. What began as a niche effort to represent real estate, bonds, and equities as digital tokens gained force as asset managers like Franklin Templeton and BlackRock created tokenized government money-market and Treasury funds.

More recently, Robinhood and Ondo Finance have brought on-chain versions of stocks and exchange-traded funds to investors outside the United States. Earlier this month, Nasdaq announced a $100 million investment in Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, to continue building out tokenized stocks. The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a limited path for compliant U.S. venues to test blockchain-based equity trading.

The divergence between Wall Street's vision and actual trading habits is most visible in equities. In traditional finance, passive index-wide investing reigns supreme: more than 6,000 U.S.-listed ETFs now outnumber individual stocks.

On-chain, users prefer individual companies. Dune estimates that individual stocks account for 81% of tokenized equities held in spot markets. The value of those holdings grew ninefold over the past year, outpacing tokenized funds and ETFs.

"While a lot of the world's financial system today has become indices and packaged products,… when people trade on the blockchain, it's to express themselves more, as opposed to passive investing," Haga said.

The split extends into lending. In traditional finance, U.S. Treasuries are the standard backing for loans because they are considered safe and easy to value. On crypto lending platforms, investors more often deposit tokenized private credit—loans to businesses that can offer higher returns. Dune found that credit assets make up about three-quarters of all real-world assets deposited in decentralized lending, while only a tiny fraction of tokenized Treasuries is used the same way.

Yield is one reason, according to Haga. Tokenized private credit lets investors earn interest on their holdings while using those same assets as collateral to borrow and fund other trades—a dual function that packaged index products do not offer.

With Nasdaq, Robinhood, BlackRock, and Franklin Templeton all now positioned in tokenized markets, and the SEC testing compliant blockchain-based equity trading, the question for incumbents is no longer whether on-chain finance scales, but whether traditional market architecture can coexist with a system that trades individual stocks around the clock.