- The trading volume of tokenized stocks surged by 170x, while the market value of risk-weighted assets remained stable:

Monthly transfers of tokenized stocks rose to $9 billion in June, compared with $53 million in June 2025.
The active market value of real-world assets held steady at around $27 billion, indicating a slowdown in adoption.
Ethena’s founder says that projects offering familiar products on real-world interfaces will drive crypto adoption.

The tokenized stocks market is seeing quiet growth, with monthly transfer volume rising to $9 billion in June—an enormous jump compared with just $53 million in the same month last year. This represents an increase of more than 170x, highlighting how quickly traditional stock trading is spreading on the blockchain.

Tokenized stock transfer volume | Source: a16z crypto

Tokenized stock activity is increasing, but still lags behind the traditional market
The sharp rise in tokenized stock transfers points to increased demand from traders who want to invest in popular equities, without having to leave familiar crypto platforms. Crypto trading platforms provide 24/7 trading and settlement, as well as fractional ownership, including direct access to self-custodied assets.

Despite the significant jump in transfer volume, this announced growth does not appear to translate into a broader expansion of the emerging real-world assets sector, whose active market value seems to have stabilized at around $27.3 billion. According to DeFi Llama, the average total market value of on-chain real-world assets is about $30 billion, distributed across 183 asset issuers.

Active market value of asset-backed assets | Source: DeFi Llama

After the notable growth in transfer volume over the past year, the current stability suggests increased turnover of existing capital, but with slowing inflows of new capital. In other words, crypto adoption is still far too slow, showing that the linkage between traditional markets and crypto markets remains out of reach.

Ethena founder Jay Young shared his view on the next stage of growth in an interview with CoinShares on the sidelines of the Consensus Hong Kong 2026 conference, noting that broad-based adoption will come from projects that offer familiar products and real-world interfaces—making it easier for everyday users instead of requiring them to adapt to entirely new systems.

Young said: “You have to go meet users where they are in the real world, using a familiar form. Expecting the whole world to download a MetaMask account and feel comfortable working on a desktop app is not how most people will engage with these products.”

Young argued that regulation remains a major obstacle, slowing the adoption of crypto-linked investment assets. And the lack of consistent frameworks across regulators in Europe and the United States puts developers in a “weird position, because the product itself is global by nature.”
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