Big names from Wall Street are increasingly putting their traditional investment products on the blockchain. The numbers don’t lie. More assets are being tokenized year after year, and Ethereum (ETH) is leading the way.
Explosive growth on Ethereum
The market for so-called tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) on Ethereum has exploded over the past year. RWAs are traditional investments, such as government bonds, money market funds and commodities, that are placed on the blockchain as digital tokens.
Tokenizing RWAs offers many benefits. Thanks to the blockchain, the middleman is skipped and investments can be traded faster and cheaper. In addition, the blockchain works 24/7, unlike the stock market, for example.
Figures from The Block show that the total value of this market on the Ethereum network has increased from $4.1 billion to approximately $17 billion. That is a growth of no less than 315 percent in one year.
Ethereum now owns approximately 34 percent of all tokenized RWA value, by far the largest share of all blockchain networks.
In addition, Layer-2 projects running on top of Ethereum, such as Arbitrum (ARB) and Polygon (POL), also control a significant portion of the tokenized market. This amounts to approximately 1.7 billion and 1.23 billion dollars respectively.
BlackRock and JPMorgan are leading the charge
What is also striking is that large financial institutions are driving growth. Asset manager BlackRock launched the BUIDL fund in 2024 via the Securitize platform. This fund invests in short-term US government bonds and has become the largest tokenized money market fund on a public blockchain.
Earlier this month, BlackRock went one step further. The company made BUIDL tradable via the decentralized trading platform UniswapX. In doing so, BlackRock is building a direct bridge between large institutional capital and the world of decentralized finance (DeFi).
Investment bank JPMorgan is also not standing still. In December, the bank launched its first tokenized money market fund on Ethereum, called My OnChain Net Yield Fund (MONY). The fund starts with an initial capital of $100 million
The fund focuses on professional investors and invests in short-term, relatively safe loans to governments and companies. It pays interest and accrues dividends daily, similar to a traditional money market fund.
More than just bonds
In addition to bond-based tokenization, we also see that raw materials are increasingly being put on the blockchain. The market for tokenized commodities grew by 53 percent in the first six weeks of this year and is now worth more than $6 billion.
That growth is almost entirely driven by gold. Tether Gold (XAUT) and PAX Gold (PAXG) together account for more than 95 percent of the total gold token market.
What does the future of tokenization look like?
The traditional financial industry is convinced of the technology. BlackRock names tokenization in its latest Thematic Outlook as one of the megatrends of 2026, alongside artificial intelligence (AI).
Investment bank Standard Chartered estimates that the total value of tokenized RWAs could reach $2 trillion by 2028. According to the bank, the majority of this would be issued on Ethereum.
Source: https://newsbit.nl/wall-street-zet-miljarden-op-ethereum-tokenisatie-breekt-records/
