2026 On-chain RWA Mid-year Report: The market value of tokenized stocks has doubled in a year, but 90% of the rights are empty shells

Original Title: The State of Onchain Real-World Assets in Mid-2026

Original Author: insights4vc

Original Compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Introduction: The scale of on-chain tokenized assets looks impressive, but it hides a fundamental contradiction—products that can circulate freely often lack real ownership rights, while products with genuine legal validity lack liquidity. This report dissects with concrete data how much of this "1.89 billion dollar market" is real money, making it a must-read for any investor considering positioning in on-chain securities.

The stock market has not moved on-chain. What has emerged is a more reliable infrastructure layer—used for distributing securities, recording ownership claims, and completing transaction settlements through blockchain-based systems.

Data from RWA.xyz shows that the value of distributed tokenized stocks grew from 951 million dollars in March 2026 to 1.89 billion dollars in July, nearly doubling. However, this growth primarily comes from a few products and platforms.

The most significant progress comes from regulated market infrastructure, especially Nasdaq's same CUSIP settlement model and the commercialization rollout in the DTC program. Liquidity, investor distribution, and independent on-chain price discovery mechanisms remain very limited. Tokenized government bonds continue to show a stronger product-market fit, while stock ETFs may be easier to scale than individual stocks.

Therefore, this market is best understood as a fragmented "Layer 2.5" system: products with the strongest legal foundations often have the weakest liquidity and distribution capabilities; while packaged products with the most active trading usually have the weakest ownership rights.

This report is an update to insights4vc's March 2026 analysis of "The State of Onchain Real-World Assets," focusing on what substantial changes have occurred since its release.

The State of Onchain Real-World Assets

What Substantial Changes Happened After March

The March report distinguished between two types of assets: assets recorded on the blockchain and assets that can be transferred to external wallets. This distinction remains important today. Under RWA.xyz's framework, "represented assets" remain within the issuer's or platform's own environment; "distributed assets" can be transferred externally, although transfers may still be limited to approved or whitelisted wallets.

However, mere transferability is no longer sufficient to assess a product's maturity.

Since March, offshore products have become more convenient for cross-chain flow and use in decentralized markets. Ondo has expanded to Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Solana, introducing decentralized routing and adding continuous minting and redemption features for some products. xStocks has also expanded its distribution channels and collateral integration.

Meanwhile, regulated U.S. infrastructure has taken a different path: the focus is not on unrestricted portability, but on legal certainty, controlled wallets, compliant custody, transfer agent records, and integration with DTC.

Figure: Evolution of various RWA asset market values from 2019 to 2026 (including tokenized stocks, government bonds, etc.)

These two paths address different issues: offshore packaged products enhance accessibility and composability; regulated infrastructure strengthens the connection between tokens and legal ownership claims.

"Canonical shares" are the basic securities form authorized by the issuer, whose transfer is recognized in the official ownership system. This is fundamentally different from third-party tools that only track stock prices or performance.

Currently, no product can simultaneously achieve all four elements at scale: standard ownership, widespread wallet distribution, institutional liquidity, and independent on-chain price discovery.

Figure: Summary of on-chain real asset statistics (as of July 28, totaling approximately 36.78 billion dollars, with U.S. government bonds accounting for 43.95%)

More macro-level RWA total data also needs to be interpreted cautiously. RWA.xyz reported on July 29 that the distributed value is 36.81 billion dollars, and the represented value is 218.27 billion dollars. The represented value has superficially decreased by 12.43 billion dollars, which should not be interpreted as capital outflow or a redemption wave. Between the two observation dates, a large number of datasets underwent additions, deletions, reclassifications, or revaluations.

These numbers describe the equity value covered by the platform's methodology at specific points in time, rather than a measure of investor capital flow.

The series of tokenized stocks is more valuable for reference, as the same "bridged token value" methodology can be applied to both periods. Even so, the reported 98.5% increase cannot be clearly broken down into new issuances, price increases, and classification adjustments.

FGRS provides a useful example. Figure completed fundraising by issuing 4.375 million shares of blockchain stock at 32 dollars per share, but the reported value subsequently fluctuated with market prices. Without daily data on minting, burning, and net asset values for each product, it is impossible to reliably reconstruct the total market net issuance.

Why the 1.88 Billion Dollar Headline Figure is Misleading

RWA.xyz uses "bridged token value" to measure tokenized stocks, calculated as: bridged circulating supply multiplied by net asset value.

The circulating supply does not include balances identified as treasury holdings or pre-minted inventory. The bridged figure also excludes tokens locked in known bridging contracts to avoid double counting an asset locked on one network and issued on another.

This is an effective metric for measuring distributed value, but it is different from freely tradable shares. Freely tradable shares refer to the portion of securities that are truly available for public trading after excluding restricted positions, strategic positions, and concentrated holdings.

The timing of the data is also important. The provided asset-level export data shows that the distributed total value on July 27 was 1.8879 billion dollars, consistent with the approximately 1.88 billion dollars shown on the dashboard. The snapshot from July 29 across platforms and networks totaled about 1.872 billion dollars.

The difference of 15.8 million dollars accounts for 0.84%, aligning with the changes in price and token supply between the two observation dates. Therefore, the growth calculations for specific tools in this report use data from July 27, while platform and network market shares use the snapshot from July 29, with the two datasets not mixed in the same calculation.

Figure: Details of tokenized stocks (10 underlying assets, categorized by issuing platform and network, with FGRS highest at approximately 191 million dollars)

Three named tools contributed about half of the incremental growth: SECZ increased by 169 million dollars post-listing, FGRS increased by 162.9 million dollars, and STRCx increased by 126.6 million dollars. Together, they contributed 458.6 million dollars, accounting for 49% of the total increment of 936.8 million dollars. Long-tail products contributed another 150.5 million dollars, accounting for 16.1% of the increment.

These numbers reflect changes in distributed value, not investor subscription amounts.

SECZ is influenced by both the number of represented shares and the Securitize NYSE stock price. FGRS reflects a comprehensive view of issuance, conversion activity, and market price changes. STRCx depends on the circulating supply and value of certificates linked to Strategy floating-rate preferred shares.

Referring to the above three growth figures as "inflows into tokenized stocks" merges several economically distinct events into a single potentially misleading number.

Concentration is more evident at the platform level. In the snapshot from July 29, Ondo and xStocks together accounted for 72.7% of the distributed value. Including Securitize, the share of the top three platforms rises to 85.1%.

Figure: RWA.xyz Platform Rankings—Ondo (45.21%), xStocks (27.51%), Securitize (12.40%) in the top three

The distribution across blockchain networks is more decentralized, but this does not eliminate the underlying common dependencies. Ethereum leads with a 36.2% value share, followed by Solana (19.6%) and BNB Chain (15.8%). Provenance and Avalanche are primarily driven by Figure and Securitize, respectively.

Products issued on different networks may still rely on the same packaging issuer, broker, custodian, securities agent, or reference price provider.

Figure: RWA.xyz Network Rankings—Ethereum (36.24%), Solana (19.63%), BNB Chain (15.82%) in the top three

This market has expanded in breadth, but legal unification has not yet been achieved. Multiple tokens can simultaneously reference Apple Inc. stock or the S&P 500 ETF, but they each represent independent legal liabilities, bound by different jurisdictions and relying on different intermediaries.

Bridging adjustments can prevent the same token from being double-counted across different networks, but they cannot—and should not—merge products that reference similar assets but provide substantively different legal rights.