“Real World Assets” To Become Even Bigger Crypto Theme In 2026; Could RWA Protocols Like Ondo Finance Finally Trade Evenly With Bitcoin?
Real World Assets (RWA) have been floating around the crypto universe since around 2015, with mostly conceptual, early experiments. Only now are investors getting excited about them.
Fast forward to 2024 and Wall Street moves on the market with BlackRock launching BUIDL, its digital asset fund. It quickly grew to $500 million in assets under management in 2024 and hit $2 billion in 2025. BlackRock added BUIDL to the Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) blockchain this year, looking to pepper the crypto market with its tokenized Treasury bond fund. BUIDL is on other blockchains, as well.
RWAs will become a bigger play in 2026.
“That’s because real-world asset tokenization stands out today as the institutional focus, with BlackRock and JPMorgan actively building in a sector that’s grown to $35 billion,” said Jonatan Randin, a trading-focused market analyst at PrimeXBT, an offshore crypto derivatives platform catering to active, high-risk traders.
Ben Elvidge, Head of Commercial Applications at Trilitech, the London-based R&D hub for the Tezos (CRYPTO: XTZ) blockchain, thinks RWAs will continue seeing strong growth in 2026 because of stablecoin regulations in the West.
Elvide said stablecoins and other digitized RWAs are being used “not only for basic issuance but also as collateral, lending assets, and liquidity sources inside decentralized finance programs.”.
RWAs: More Products Coming.
Compared with early‑to‑mid 2024, when the tokenized treasuries and RWA fund universe was concentrated in a relatively small set of issuers, the landscape in 2025 includes a broader range of U.S. asset managers and newer fintechs launching multiple funds each.
When BUIDL launched, dozens of distinct tokenized RWA funds followed, with a smaller subset tied to U.S. fund sponsors like BlackRock whose underlying assets are tokenized Treasury bonds. The market was measured in a few billion dollars at that time.
But in 2025, hundreds of new RWA products came to market globally – from real estate to tokenized stocks, tokenized gold, and private credit. Total tokenized RWA value is now in the tens of billions of dollars, with tokenized U.S. treasuries and money‑market funds being the most popular (after basic stablecoins). These tokenized Treasurys allow investors from around the …
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