Industry Leaders at PBW Push Back on the Myth of Instant Liquidity for Tokenized Assets - Crypto Economy

TL;DR

• Panelists at Paris Blockchain Week said tokenization can improve issuance and access, but it does not automatically create liquidity for inherently illiquid assets.
• Tokenized RWA market grew from $8.8 billion to about $29.9 billion in one year, led by Treasurys and commodities.
• Real estate and private equity grew too, but speakers stressed larger issuance does not prove secondary trading or durable liquidity yet.

Industry leaders at Paris Blockchain Week are pushing back against one of tokenization’s most convenient promises: that putting an asset onchain will somehow make it easy to trade. Their message was blunt: tokenization can widen access, improve issuance and modernize infrastructure, but it does not magically create buyers, sellers or functioning secondary markets. That distinction is becoming harder to ignore as tokenized real-world assets expand rapidly and the market starts confronting a more uncomfortable question than growth: whether those assets can actually achieve durable liquidity once issued at scale today.

That skepticism was voiced clearly during a panel on real-world asset liquidity, where executives argued that illiquid assets do not become liquid merely because they are digitized. The point sounded simple, but it cuts directly against one of the sector’s most repeated assumptions. Speakers said assets such as real estate and private credit were never especially liquid in their traditional form, so placing them onchain should not be expected to erase the structural limits that shaped them before. In that sense, tokenization may change packaging and access without transforming the underlying trading reality.

Growth Is Real, but Liquidity Remains Uneven

The backdrop to that debate is a market that has grown fast enough to invite bigger claims. Tokenized real-world assets have expanded sharply in size, yet the strongest gains have been concentrated in instruments that were already easier to standardize and trade. Data cited during the discussion showed the tokenized RWA market grew from $8.8 billion on April 16, 2025, to about $29.9 billion on April 16, 2026. Much of that expansion came from tokenized US Treasury debt and commodities, categories that fit more naturally into liquid, standardized market structures.


By contrast, the segments most often used to sell the dream of tokenization remain smaller, even after posting strong percentage growth. That is where the panel’s pushback lands hardest: issuance growth and market value are not the same thing as active tradability. Tokenized real estate rose from roughly $35 million to $296 million over the year, while private equity increased from nearly $60 million to $223 million. Other areas, including asset-backed credit and corporate credit, also expanded in absolute terms, but speakers stressed that a larger outstanding market does not prove meaningful secondary trading is taking place.