Tokenization in 2026: What the Data Says | Dean Khan Dhillon - RWA.xyz

All right, next up we have tokenization in 2026. What the data says. So I will pass it off to Dean Khan Dylan, head of growth at rwa.xyz.

Hello everybody. Thanks very much for coming. Today I'm going to talk about tokenization. Uh, just before I get into it, can everybody hear me? Okay, quick thumbs up.

Great. So, let's start off with a quick show of hands in the audience. Hands up if you would consider yourself uh a beginner when it comes to tokenization. Raise it nice and high. Okay, cool.

Uh, and hands up if you'd consider yourself uh an expert when it comes to all things tokenization. Hands up. Okay, great. Got a a nice solid mix. Um, so who am I?

I'm dean, head of growth at RWA.xyz. Uh what do we do? Think of us like uh Bloomberg but for crypto. So we are a data analytics platform primarily for tokenized assets.

The goal in the next 10 minutes is to help everyone understand more about tokenized data and specifically how it can impact you and yeah specifically you Otto in in the lovely blue jeans there. I'm going to help you understand more about tokenization, mate. Cool. Let's get into it. Um, so going to start with uh some quick explainers to make sure we're all on the same page.

What is tokenization? Tokenization is simply the process of turning ownership of a real asset into a digital blockchain token. Why does that even matter? And no, it's not just because Larry thinks so. There's actually a couple more reasons than that.

[snorts] Part of finance is fundamentally broken. There's friction when you try to sell certain assets. Anyone in the room who owns real estate or private market investments knows that it can take months to sell certain assets. There's capital restrictions. Sometimes you need to be an accredited investor and you need a minimum of 100k to make an investment.

T plus2 settlement makes moving money slow and there's limited access depending on the country you live. Tokenization removes these barriers and makes investing open and instant. How does it do that? When you tokenize an asset on the blockchain, liquidity becomes instant and you can transact any asset at any time. It allows for fractional ownership.

Instead of needing a h 100red grand to invest in an asset, you can invest smaller units. It allows for instant settlement and global markets. I can invest in any asset anytime, anywhere, regardless of where I live. So let's get into some real world examples. Now you understand the problems that tokenization solves, how it solves it.

Uh quick caveat is that this data is from a website from last week. So taken from February 9th. So you know the industry is volatile. There may be some tiny bits of changes, so do your own research. Everyone knows about stable coins.

The market has grown exponentially to a total value of $292 billion and is by far the dominant category leader and why it matters to you. You can use it for a variety of use cases. You can use it for remittances and sending money back home. You can use it if you own a business as contractor payouts and vendor payments. So, stable coins is by far the the market leader, followed by tokenized US treasuries, which I believe last week uh crossed 10 billion in value, led [snorts] by Black Rocks Bidd, which is over now $1.

8 billion in value. And why does it matter for you? People like me and you can now access these institutional grade products. I could not access tokenized treasuries before. I could not access institutional funds before.

So another perfect example, Janice Henderson, a massive Tradfire player, have tokenized their own CLLO fund, collateralized loan obligation fund. Blockchain Capital have tokenized their own liquid venture fund. These are all assets that people like me and you would not have had access to if it was not for tokenization. So how does this actually impact you? If you're a retail investor like me, as we just discussed, it allows for more access to institutional grade products.

If you're an institutional investor, you have 24/7 access to global markets. If you're an asset manager, you have all of these global institutional channels to target. And if you're infrastructure provider, you have reduced operational overhead because you use the blockchain as a ledger instead of a bunch of Excel documents and PDFs. largely benefits every party in the ecosystem. One thing to note is that real world assets have grown tremendously over the past few years.

So much so that it's become a bit of a a catchall term. Real world asset A is not necessarily the same as real world asset B. What do I mean by that? Our team has come up with a distinction and defined terms. We have distributed assets and represented assets.

Let's define this. A distributed asset is simply the ability to transfer a token peer-to-peer. I.e. I can transfer the token from my wallet to your wallet.

What's an example of that? Tether gold. Pretty simple. I can log into my MetaMask or Phantom and I can transfer Tether Gold to your wallet. A [snorts] represented asset on the other hand, an example is Figure, America's largest HELOC uh loan provider.

So they've tokenized their loans. I could not transfer you a loan from my wallet to yours. We could transfer it within their own marketplace, but not any other wallet. So that is a represented asset. Why would someone tokenize an asset in a represented manner?

Primarily for operational efficiency gains. Again, remember when you when you tokenize an asset, you don't need to use PDFs and Excel documents and all this fancy admin for recordeping purposes. You have the blockchain as a source of truth. So, Figure is a good example of a represented asset. Although, one note once a represented asset is not always a represented asset.

Figure is actually a good example of a company that is slowly becoming more distributed and they're integrating their assets within DeFi. So lovely little Avengers meme. Hopefully we all agree tokenization is is inevitable. Uh I'm going to crack on with some examples of the current state of tokenization, where I think it's heading and some predictions. So this is uh the juicy bit in terms of the asset classes that are winning.

We all know stable coins by far are the market leaders. So caveat for this slide is that this is excluding stable coins. US treasuries have 40.7% market share. Commodities have 21.

8%. Private credit with 11.7%. Those are the market leaders. A common denominator you can see is that all of these asset classes are fairly familiar to institutions and they provide quite low yield uh and therefore low risk.

some asset classes which are lagging. Real estate, tokenized real estate, still pretty new um when it comes to this this asset class and there's not much secondary liquidity right now. And then also a bunch of other niche asset classes like collectibles. Frankly, they haven't picked up yet. In terms of the networks that are winning, Ethereum is by far the dominant leader primarily because of deep defi liquidity.

This is something you do not get in TRFI. Imagine, I'm sure someone in the audience has an account with Fidelity. Let's say you own a US Treasury in your Fidelity account. It's pretty much stuck there. You You can't borrow against it.

You can't use it as collateral. You can't lend it. You can't put it in a vault. Uh I mean, maybe you can. You have to access all these different intermediaries and you'll just get chopped down with fees.

Whereas if you use DeFi and you have a tokenized treasury, I could borrow against my tokenized treasury, whack it into Moro or Ave and uh use those stable coins for other different looping strategies. So DeFi is a huge benefit of tokenized assets and that's why kind of Ethereum's leading the way there. Next, I want to go through a few myths, a couple of a couple of things that grind my gears. I have a lot of friends in the traditional finance world and they often say to me, Dean, you know, is your is your career not at risk? Isn't tokenization so dependent upon Bitcoin price action?

Uh, and no, absolutely not. So, this is on the Y-axis we have Bitcoin price, on the [snorts] X-axis we have dates, and on the secondary Y-axis we have distributed asset value. Bitcoin is down 45 plus% from its all-time high. I'm sure we're all feeling the brunt of that. Tokenized distributed asset value is hitting all-time highs.

You can see that is not an asset that is extremely correlated with Bitcoin. They fundamentally have different demand drivers. Secondly, institutions aren't adopting tokenization. Another myth. Three of the biggest institutions in the world, Black Rockck, JP Morgan, Franklin Templeton, have all tokenized their own institutional treasury products or money market funds.

JP Morgan's pretty recent. They tokenized their own money market fund just this year. These are three of the most conservative institutions and they're all tokenizing their own assets. Institutions are pretty interested. And finally, some predictions.

I've spent the past few minutes talking about all the positives of tokenization, but you know, it's not all roses. There are some problems. Macro is not looking great. There are kind of education bottlenecks and institutions are still learning about the space. And frankly, the biggest problem is uh discovery.

A lot of capital allocators are interested, but they're struggling to find asset issuers and vice versa. So, there's a bit of a bottleneck when it comes to the opakeness of the industry. On the bright side, some catalysts. I'm sure everyone heard the news of the New York Stock Exchange who's creating their own tokenization platform. The DTCC received a no action letter from the SEC.

Uh the SEC chairman Paul Atkins is also publicly championing tokenization. And lastly, from every institution I'm speaking to and just in the past few weeks spoke to the European Central Bank, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, they're all massively expanding their digital asset teams and they're investing significant capital into talent. So to round up with a a couple predictions, I'm assuming distributed tokenized assets is going to double to more than 50 billion. Right now we're at 24 billion. I think tokenized treasuries will also double to exceed 20 billion and to explain the reasoning behind this stable coins about 290 billion.

I think most of us can agree stable coins is going to go up and to the right and it's a fundamental step up in the future of finance. Those stable coins have to do something. They're going to want to earn yield. Let's say you have a corporate treasury that has a bunch of USDC. They're going to do something with that.

So for that reason I believe these stable coins are going to be invested into RWAs into distributed assets into tokenized treasuries. Those are my main two predictions followed by I think secondary markets that are going to scale quite exponentially as institutions understand the benefits of of DeFi. Finally by 2036 I think tokenization become going to become a standard financial infrastructure and all of this blockchain stuff will be abstracted away and it will become a norm. To summarize, where do we fit? Um, look, the industry is new.

Tokenization is very new. It's only popped off over the last few years. Uh, it's quite opaque. Uh, we are simply an intelligence layer, a data layer to help educate everyone in the industry. These are a couple of our users, but that's it for now.

I'll be moderating a panel after with more tokenization experts. Yeah, appreciate your time. Thank you everyone for listening.

[music]