This is a contributor content by Nischal Shetty, CoFounder of Shardeum, a Layer 1 blockchain.
In 2018, the industry was certain that within five years every asset on earth would live on a blockchain. Real estate, art, private equity, shipping containers. There were conferences and there were decks about it. A whole category called security tokens got funded, launched, and then quietly stopped being mentioned, the way things do when nobody wants to say “dead” out loud.
What killed it wasn’t regulators, though that’s the story usually told. The products were tedious. People filled out forms, waited for approval, bought a token you couldn’t sell to anyone, and watched it sit in a wallet doing nothing. The technology was fine. Nobody wanted the experience.
That category is back, and this time the balance sheets behind it are enormous. BlackRock is here. Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan. The DTCC , the institution that quietly holds the world’s securities together, is running custodied assets through a blockchain pilot. Tokenized real-world assets on public chains passed $30 billion this year, four times what they were in early 2025. Those are not small signals.
But if you try to actually buy one you need to pick a tokenized Treasury fund, open a wallet, see how far it goes. Somewhere between the whitelist, the minimum ticket, and the onboarding form, it becomes clear this thing behaves less like a token and more like a private placement that happens to settle on a chain. Most people stop there, and it’s hard to blame them.
The data says the same thing, less politely. A report from BeInCrypto published in July found more than $32.9 billion in tokenized assets across some 900 products with zero weekly transfer activity. Not thin trading, Zero. One report called the market a waiting room, which is about right.
So the honest question isn’t whether tokenization works, it does. It’s whether anything has been learned since 2018, or whether the same tedious product has been rebuilt with better logos on it.
What made the other thing spread
It’s worth remembering why crypto travelled as far as it did, because it wasn’t the volatility and it wasn’t the casino. A few plain properties did most of the work.
No permission required. No minimum, no accreditation letter, no relationship manager. A student in Lucknow and a fund in London touch the same asset on the same terms. Most tokenized funds today are whitelisted, jurisdiction-gated, and start at six figures.
Other people can build on it. A crypto asset is useful the moment it exists as collateral, in a pool, inside something a stranger assembles at 2 a.m. without asking anyone. Roughly a tenth of tokenized RWAs dont touch DeFi.
It never closes. When markets shut during the geopolitical scare earlier this year, on-chain commodity venues were the only place left to price risk. That edge disappears the moment redemption takes T+2 and a compliance review.
The holder actually holds it. If only the issuer can call the transfer function, the user doesn’t own an asset. They own a line in someone’s database they’re allowed to look at.
Tokenized Treasuries are the interesting exception the one category analysts will call production-grade, at around $15 billion, reasonably liquid, increasingly usable as collateral. They behave like crypto assets rather than like funds, which is unlikely to be a coincidence.
The objection
Someone always says compliance won’t allow this, and they’re not wrong exactly. Securities law requires knowing who holds what.But that’s an argument for checking the identity, not the asset. Verify a wallet once, then let it move among other verified wallets. GENIUS in the US and MiCA in Europe delivered the clarity the industry spent a decade asking for, and so far it has mostly gone into rebuilding gated products on faster rails.
The rest is unglamorous product work. Denominations small enough to matter to a normal person. Distribution through wallets people already use. A secondary market designed from the start rather than promised in a roadmap.
None of this predicts that RWAs win. 2018 was a lesson in not making those predictions. It’s simply that the thing standing in the way isn’t the technology, and hasn’t been for years.
About Nischal Shetty
Nischal Shetty is one of the most influential voices in India’s crypto and blockchain ecosystem. He is the Co-founder of Shardeum, an EVM-based Layer 1 blockchain.
He is also the Founder and CEO of WazirX, India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, serving 12+ million users. Under his leadership, WazirX played a pivotal role in onboarding India’s first wave of crypto users and shaping the country’s digital asset economy.
About Shardeum
Shardeum is a Layer 1 blockchain that is building the foundation for a homegrown on-chain ecosystem. Let’s build dApps for India, applications that are affordable, accessible, and designed for the needs of a digital-first population. By enabling developers and users to move beyond exchanges and onto decentralized networks, Shardeum aims to unlock the next phase of Web3 adoption in India. For more information, visit https://shardeum.org/ .
The above article “RWAs Won’t Go Mainstream Until They Feel Like Crypto” was first published on AlexaBlockchain. Read the complete article here: https://alexablockchain.com/rwas-wont-go-mainstream-until-they-feel-like-crypto/
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