Many people on Wall Street expected tokenization—the process of turning assets into tokens that can be traded on a blockchain—to amount to little more than reproducing legacy financial products on a digital ledger. What has happened instead has been eye-opening. According to a new report from data analytics platform Dune, on-chain investors are also using tokenization technology to construct an around-the-clock financial system that defies the design of traditional markets.
This development has coincided with rapid institutional adoption of tokenization. Dune reports that the total supply of tokenized real-world assets has exceeded $34 billion in 2026, and major categories—including cash equivalents and commodities—have more than doubled over the past year. Tokenized stocks have grown the fastest, rising more than 2,000% as the number of active holders blew past one million, per Dune.
Rather than simply putting familiar financial products on blockchain rails, onchain 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.”
Few crypto inventions have captured Wall Street’s attention like the promise of bringing real-world assets on-chain. What began as a niche effort to represent real estate, bonds, and equities as digital tokens quickly gained momentum as asset managers like Franklin Templeton and BlackRock created tokenized government money-market and Treasury funds.
More recently, companies like Robinhood and Ondo Finance have brought onchain versions of stocks and exchange-traded funds to investors outside the United States. Earlier this month, Nasdaq announced a $100 investment in Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, to continue building out tokenized stocks. Meanwhile, 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. On Wall Street, passive index-wide investing reigns supreme, as more than 6,000 U.S.-listed ETFs now outnumber individual stocks.
But 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 is also clear in lending. In traditional finance, U.S. Treasuries are the standard backing for loans because they are considered safe and easy to value. But on crypto lending platforms, investors are more often depositing tokenized private credit, or 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 can allow investors to earn interest on their holdings while using those same assets as collateral to borrow and fund other trades.