Pantera Capital’s September 2026 report on the state of tokenization tracked 671 tokenized assets with a combined market size of $331.8 billion and argued that on-chain issuance has largely matured. The firm said the harder problem now is building compliant, liquid secondary markets. The report also examined liquidity differences across asset classes, the rise of perpetual derivatives, and the use of real-world assets, or RWA, in collateralized lending. This article is based on key points compiled by Foresight News from the report.
Market structure shifted as stablecoins fell and non-stablecoin RWA expanded
In Q1 and Q2 of 2026, the total tokenized market cap edged down 0.8%, but the internal mix changed sharply. Stablecoin market value fell from $302.4 billion to $295.5 billion, a 2.3% decline. Non-stablecoin tokenized assets rose 13.3%, adding $4.3 billion, with most of that growth coming from tokenized U.S. Treasuries, private credit, and equities.
On the supply side, 28 tokenized products launched in Q2, bringing the total for the first half of 2026 to 45 new products. Pantera said the pace of bringing traditional assets on-chain accelerated, including private credit, corporate bonds, and AAA-rated collateralized loan obligations. By category, tokenized U.S. Treasuries grew from $13 billion to $16.5 billion, an increase of $3.5 billion. Private credit expanded from $4.1 billion to $5.1 billion, adding $1 billion.
The report introduced a Tokenization Progress Index, or TPI, to measure how much real operational activity an asset supports on-chain. Among 515 assets scored in both Q1 and Q2, 501 showed no change in TPI. The market-wide average composite TPI stood at just 2.04. Pantera said that most products still sit at the wrapper layer, meaning they mainly map claims on off-chain assets onto blockchains. Hybrid structures and natively on-chain assets remain a small share of the market, and market value is growing faster than genuine on-chain functionality.
Liquidity was heavily shaped by access rules
Pantera selected 110 non-stablecoin products with market caps of at least $10 million as a liquidity sample and split them into open-access and permissioned groups based on token transfer rules. Permissioned products accounted for 59% of the sample’s market value but generated only 0.2% of spot trading volume. Open-access products represented 41% of market value and produced 99.8% of total spot turnover.
Among 48 whitelist-restricted products, 46 failed to reach a monthly turnover rate of 1%, which the report used as a liquidity threshold. Pantera drew a distinction here: weak spot trading in permissioned products does not mean there is no exit path. Those assets often rely on issuer redemption channels rather than public secondary markets such as decentralized exchanges.
Turnover varied widely by asset class. In June, tokenized equities posted a spot turnover rate of 204.6%, making them the most actively traded category in the sample. Commodities came in at 16.7%, private credit at 9.5%, and private funds at 9.4%. Interest-rate products were at 0.1%. On that basis, equity turnover was close to 2,000 times that of interest-rate assets.
The report said tokenized Treasury-like assets face a liquidity problem on-chain even though they are highly liquid in traditional markets, and tied that mismatch to the structure of automated market makers. AMM pools depend on trading turnover to generate fees. Low-turnover assets struggle to attract market makers, which can push liquidity lower over time. Pantera estimated that selling $10 million of an asset while using up to 15% of average daily volume would take 0.5 days for tokenized equities, but 126.5 days for interest-rate assets.
Pantera also applied a two-part screen: liquidity, defined as monthly turnover of at least 1%, and distribution, defined as at least 1,000 token-holding addresses with the top 10 addresses owning no more than 90% of supply. Only 29 of the 110 sample products met both conditions. Those assets represented 23.5% of the sample’s market value, and every one of them was open access. Another 57 products, equal to 54.1% of sample market value, showed both weak turnover and concentrated ownership, leaving them with little or no public spot trading.
Perpetuals and Robinhood Chain opened new access routes
Pantera said traders do not need to hold tokenized spot assets to gain exposure. On-chain perpetual contracts now offer a synthetic route.
In June 2026, stock perpetuals on Hyperliquid and Lighter reached $67.8 billion in trading volume, or 16 times the size of tokenized equity spot volume. By the end of the first half, stock perpetual open interest stood at $2.5 billion in notional terms, equal to 121.3% of the market value of tokenized equities in spot form. The report noted that high derivatives volume reflects leverage and frequent repositioning, not actual capital committed, and that the underlying asset sets in derivatives and spot markets do not fully overlap. Ondo launched stock perpetual products for non-U.S. users in July and recorded $9 billion in cumulative volume within weeks.
Robinhood Chain was presented as a major distribution channel. Its mainnet went live on July 1 and listed tokenized versions of Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, and ETFs such as SPY and QQQ to test whether retail-facing traffic could turn into real market participation. In its first month, total tokenized market value on the platform grew by about five times. Weekly RWA trading volume climbed from $5 million in the first week to $887.5 million by the end of August. RWA’s share of DEX trading volume rose from 0.1% to 12.9%.
Even so, ownership concentration remained severe. Of 64,981 addresses with balances on the platform, 73.8% held less than $10. Just 669 addresses, or 1% of holders, each with more than $1,000, controlled 95.1% of total asset value. Robinhood Chain listed 202 RWA contracts, but only 96 attracted actual funded positions. Only 32 products had more than 100 wallets with balances above $1. Pantera said that product listings are expanding much faster than real capital formation and broad user participation.
RWA collateral found a foothold in DeFi lending
Pantera said tokenized assets do not derive value only from spot trading. Their use as collateral is another important path, and the report used Morpho Vaults as a case study. In the first half of 2026, traceable net supplied capital in RWA collateral vaults started at $120.4 million, fell to $49 million in April, then rebounded and peaked at $208 million on June 23 before ending the quarter at $187 million.
Product architecture changed as well. MetaMorpho V1 saw continued outflows, while Vault V2 started from almost zero and reached 92% of total supply by quarter-end. By collateral type, private and consumer credit contributed $120 million of supply, reinsurance accounted for $44 million, and U.S. Treasuries made up $12 million.
Compared with broader DeFi usage, private credit showed much deeper integration. In the matched sample, 44.7% of private credit market value was deployed in DeFi total value locked. That was well above the 2.1% seen for Treasuries and the 5.6% recorded for tokenized equities. Pantera said the core risk in RWA-backed lending is not whether the asset has been tokenized, but whether redemption and liquidation can be executed reliably when a loan defaults.
Regulation may support permissioned secondary markets
On the U.S. policy side, the CLARITY Act failed to advance in the Senate on Sept. 15, leaving comprehensive token-market legislation unresolved. Two days later, on Sept. 17, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued a five-year conditional exemption for tokenized stock trading venues. Pantera said that move creates a targeted route for building secondary markets for permissioned tokenized assets. In practice, that means permissioned products may not need fully open transferability if they can rely on compliant market makers and regulated venues.
The report argued that turnover should not be treated as a universal scorecard for tokenization. Evaluation should match product design. For Treasury funds built to be held for yield, the key metrics are return performance and reliable subscriptions and redemptions. For equities and commodities, where trading matters more, the focus should be on slippage, spreads, and market-maker support. For assets used as collateral, borrowing limits, price feeds, liquidation, and redemption mechanics matter more. Some Treasury funds have very low turnover but still function as intended through issuer redemptions.
The next phase points to programmable markets and AI agents
Pantera said tokenization is moving beyond simple on-chain issuance toward programmable financial markets, with AI agents emerging as a new class of participant.
Virtuals’ AI agents can already access Ondo’s tokenized equities, turning financial assets into machine-readable standardized inventory that software can search and trade autonomously. Circle’s x402 internet payments protocol has also processed tens of millions of dollars in real transactions.
For institutional adoption, the report identified privacy infrastructure and cross-chain interoperability as hard requirements. Morpho has introduced encrypted vaults to protect user position privacy. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, or DTCC, is working to connect traditional financial infrastructure with blockchains. Oasis Pro Markets has integrated with DTCC’s Fund/SERV system, linking blockchain-based operations with the traditional servicing network used in the U.S. mutual fund industry. Tokenization of real-world resources such as compute power and energy was described as a frontier area for the machine economy, but Pantera said most of that market remains conceptual and has not matured.
Pantera’s broader conclusion was that the technical barrier to issuing tokenized assets has largely been cleared. The harder work now sits in secondary-market design, especially compliance, liquidity, and capital efficiency. Access rules strongly shape trading activity, but permissioned assets can still create value through redemption, controlled trading, and collateralized lending. Exposure demand does not have to flow through spot markets either, as perpetual derivatives are already generating large synthetic volumes. The next leg of the market, in Pantera’s view, will depend less on issuing more tokens and more on building liquidation, privacy, and cross-system interoperability infrastructure that institutions and AI agents can use safely.
