RWA Tokenization

A fund share today is a book entry: a fund administrator or a central securities depositary keeps the register, and a transfer takes a settlement cycle of one or two business days to clear. Tokenizing the same fund share means recording ownership as a token on a blockchain, so a transfer can settle in minutes once both sides confirm it. The asset itself stays the same claim on the same underlying fund. A regulator treats a tokenized bond as the same security as its paper-era version, because the record of ownership and the settlement process changed, and the legal claim behind that record did not.

Money market funds and short-term government debt lead the market because their value is easy to verify daily and their investors already expect fast settlement. BlackRock's BUIDL fund, administered by Securitize, held about 2.5 billion US dollars across six blockchains as of May 2026, and BlackRock filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in May 2026 for two further tokenized funds. Franklin Templeton runs a comparable fund and has extended the model to a Luxembourg UCITS structure for European investors. Tokenized bonds and tokenized funds cover these categories in more depth. Private credit and real estate sit further behind, since valuing an illiquid loan or a building takes a manual appraisal that a daily-priced Treasury bill does not need. ESMA's Executive Director Natasha Cazenave described the state of the market in a keynote on tokenisation: most tokenized instruments are issued through private placements and held to maturity, so they stay small and largely illiquid, and the platforms that issue them connect poorly with each other.

A tokenized security in the EU stays a security under existing law; MiCA explicitly excludes financial instruments already covered by MiFID II. What the EU added is the DLT Pilot Regime, Regulation (EU) 2022/858, which lets a market operator run trading and settlement of tokenized securities on a blockchain under temporary exemptions from parts of the standard securities rulebook, so supervisors can watch how the technology performs before writing permanent rules. Only four venues in the EU hold a DLT Pilot Regime license so far, among them the Frankfurt-based trading venue 360X. In Germany, the Elektronische Wertpapiergesetz (eWpG) already allows a security to exist only in electronic form, including on a blockchain, without a paper certificate behind it.

In 2024, Siemens issued a 300 million euro digital bond on the private blockchain of the fintech SWIAT, with Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank and DekaBank among the banks involved. The Deutsche Bundesbank's Trigger Solution settled the bond in central bank money, so the cash side of the trade cleared the same way an investor would expect from any bond, only faster and without a separate settlement system. 360X, a Frankfurt trading venue holding a DLT Pilot Regime license, carried out the bond's first secondary-market trade, with DekaBank and Union Investment as counterparties. The trade showed that a tokenized bond can move through its full lifecycle, from issuance to a secondary trade, on infrastructure that a supervisor has approved for live use.

Tokenization of real-world assets was the topic of Tokenization & On-Chain Capital Markets, a Point Zero Forum side event in Zurich, where 21X, Franklin Templeton, DFNS, AMINA and Chainlink spoke on tokenized asset infrastructure. Before the Crypto Assets Conference, CoreLedger, Finemetal and S-Pro discussed how to tokenize gold and real estate at a real-world asset evening at TechQuartier. In Germany, Finance Loop Premium Partner Gubbi runs the GDX Primary Market, and a distribution cooperation with Fondskonzept and DGFRP lets financial advisors offer tokenized real-world assets to their clients. CONF3RENCE 2026 in Dortmund, with Finance Loop as media partner, has tokenization and real-world assets as one of its four core topics. RWA tokenization sits in Finance Loop's Investment & Digital Assets track, alongside its DeFi and stablecoin topics. Related pages: tokenized bonds, tokenized funds and tokenization in Germany.

RWA tokenization means recording ownership of an existing asset, such as a bond, a fund share or a loan, as a token on a blockchain instead of in a traditional register. The underlying asset and the legal claim it represents stay the same; only the record and the settlement process change.

Boston Consulting Group put the market for tokenized real-world assets, excluding real estate and stablecoins, at roughly 600 billion US dollars in 2026, with a central estimate of about 14 trillion US dollars by 2030. Tokenized money market funds and government debt make up most of the current total.

Yes. A tokenized bond issued under Germany's eWpG or under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime carries the same rights as a conventional bond: the same coupon, the same maturity, the same claim on the issuer. The record of ownership and the settlement process run on a blockchain instead of through a central securities depositary, but the legal instrument behind the token is unchanged.