Pantera Deep Dive on Tokenization: Issuance Is No Longer the Challenge, Liquidity Is the Real Bottleneck

Crypto investment firm Pantera Capital released the State of Tokenization – September 2026 report, which catalogs 671 tokenized assets with a combined market cap of $331.8 billion. Pantera points out that while token issuance on-chain has matured, compliance and high-liquidity secondary markets remain the industry's main bottleneck. The report also breaks down hot topics such as liquidity divergence across asset categories, perpetual derivatives, and RWA-backed lending. Foresight News has compiled the report's key takeaways to help readers quickly grasp the current state and future evolution of the RWA tokenization market.

Overall Landscape: Stablecoin Share Declines, RWA Grows Against the Trend

In Q1–Q2 2026, the overall tokenized market cap saw a slight decline of 0.8%, but significant structural shifts occurred internally. The stablecoin market cap fell from $302.4 billion to $295.5 billion, a drop of 2.3%; non-stablecoin tokenized assets rose by 13.3%, adding $4.3 billion, with growth primarily driven by tokenized U.S. Treasuries, private credit, and equities.

RWA Market Cap Changes Excluding Stablecoins

On the supply side, 28 tokenized products went live in Q2, bringing the H1 2026 total to 45 new listings. Traditional assets such as private credit, corporate bonds, and AAA-rated securitized loan certificates are clearly accelerating their onboarding onto the blockchain. By sector size, the market cap for tokenized U.S. Treasuries grew from $13 billion to $16.5 billion, adding $3.5 billion; private credit expanded from $4.1 billion to $5.1 billion, adding $1 billion.

The report introduces the Tokenization Maturity Index (TPI) to measure on-chain operational capabilities. Among 515 assets rated in both Q1 and Q2, 501 maintained unchanged TPI scores, with the market average composite TPI standing at only 2.04. The vast majority of products remain wrapper assets, functioning merely as on-chain mappings of off-chain asset certificates. True hybrid models and on-chain native assets make up a low proportion, and the pace of market cap expansion significantly outstrips the development of native on-chain capabilities.

TPI Maturity Bubble Chart

Current Liquidity Landscape: Access Rights Dictate Spot Trading, Enormous Liquidity Divergence Across Assets

The report screened 110 non-stablecoin products with a market cap of at least $10 million as liquidity samples, categorizing them into open-access and permissioned groups based on token transfer rules. Permissioned products account for 59% of the sample's total market cap but contribute only 0.2% of spot trading volume, while open-access products, representing just 41% of the market cap, account for 99.8% of total spot trading volume.

Among the 48 whitelist-restricted products, 46 have monthly turnover rates below the 1% liquidity threshold. It is crucial to distinguish here that cold spot trading for permissioned products does not mean a lack of exit routes; these assets are largely disposed of through issuer redemption channels rather than relying on public secondary markets like DEXs.

Turnover rates vary drastically across different asset classes. In June, tokenized equity spot turnover reached 204.6%, making it the most actively traded category. Commodities stood at 16.7%, private credit and private funds at 9.5% and 9.4% respectively, while interest rate assets were limited to just 0.1%—equity turnover is nearly 2,000 times that of interest rate assets.

Monthly Turnover Rates for Various Assets from 2023 to June 2026

Treasuries that exhibit strong liquidity in traditional markets face a liquidity dilemma on-chain, fundamentally stemming from the nature of AMM mechanisms. Automated market maker pools generate fees through trade turnover, making it difficult for low-turnover assets to attract market makers, thus trapping them in a negative cycle of continuously weakening liquidity. The report calculates that assuming a $10 million sell-off allowed to consume 15% of daily market volume, tokenized equities would take only 0.5 days, whereas interest rate assets would require 126.5 days.

The report applies a dual screening criterion: liquidity (monthly turnover ≥1%) + distribution (≥1,000 wallet addresses, top 10 holders ≤90%). Of the 110 sample products, only 29 meet both criteria, accounting for 23.5% of the sample market cap, all of which are open-access products. Meanwhile, another 57 products collectively hold 54.1% of the sample market cap but exhibit sluggish turnover and highly concentrated holdings, generating virtually no public spot trading.

New Access Pathways: Perpetual Contracts and Robinhood Chain

Traders do not need to hold tokenized spot assets to gain exposure; on-chain perpetual contracts provide an alternative path to synthetic exposure.

In June 2026, stock perpetual contract trading volume on the two platforms Hyperliquid and Lighter reached $67.8 billion, 16 times the size of tokenized equity spot. At the end of H1, the notional outstanding size of stock perpetuals was $2.5 billion, equivalent to 121.3% of the tokenized equity spot market cap. It should be noted that high derivative trading volume stems from leverage and frequent rebalancing, which is not equivalent to actual principal deployed, and the underlying asset pools covered by derivatives and spots do not fully overlap. Ondo launched stock perpetual products for non-U.S. users in July, achieving $9 billion in cumulative volume within weeks of listing.

Notional Volume Trends for Tokenized Equity Spot and Perpetual Contracts

As a crucial distribution channel, Robinhood Chain launched its mainnet on July 1, listing mainstream tokenized stocks and ETFs such as NVIDIA, Apple, Tesla, SPY, and QQQ to test whether retail traffic can convert into genuine market participation. During its first month, the total tokenized market cap increased approximately fivefold. RWA weekly trading volume surged from $5 million in week one to $887.5 million by late August, with RWA's share of DEX trading volume rising from 0.1% to 12.9%.

Beneath the impressive trading figures, portfolio concentration remains highly pronounced. Out of 64,981 addresses with balances on the platform, 73.8% hold less than $10. Just 669 addresses, representing only 1% of total holders but each holding over $1,000, control 95.1% of the platform's total asset market cap. While the platform listed 202 RWA contracts in total, only 96 actually generated funded positions, and merely 32 products boast more than 100 wallets with balances exceeding $1. This highlights that the speed of product catalog expansion far outpaces the accumulation of real capital and broad user engagement.

Beyond Spot: RWA as Collateral Brings DeFi Lending Scenarios to Reality

Value realization for tokenized assets is not limited to spot trading; serving as collateral for lending represents another critical application direction. The report uses Morpho Vaults as a primary case study. In H1 2026, the trackable net supplied capital of RWA collateral vaults started at $120.4 million, dipped to $49 million in April, then rebounded steadily, peaking at $208 million on June 23, before closing the quarter at $187 million.

Product architecture has undergone clear iteration: funds in MetaMorpho V1 continued to flow out, while Vault V2, starting almost from zero, accounted for 92% of total supply by quarter-end. In terms of underlying collateral composition, private and consumer credit contributed $120 million in supply, followed by reinsurance at $44 million and U.S. Treasuries at $12 million. Comparing DeFi utilization levels horizontally, 44.7% of private credit matched in the sample is locked in DeFi, significantly higher than Treasuries at 2.1% and tokenized equities at 5.6%. For RWA-secured lending, the core risk lies not in completing the onboarding process, but in having reliable redemption and liquidation execution mechanisms in the event of loan defaults.

DeFi TVL Allocation Ratio by Asset Class

Regulatory Insights: Liquidity Must Align with Product Design; Avoid Measuring Success with a Single Metric

On the U.S. regulatory front, the CLARITY Act failed to advance in the Senate on September 15, leaving comprehensive legislation for the token market still unbuilt. However, on September 17, the SEC issued a five-year conditional exemption for tokenized equity trading venues, providing a targeted pathway for building secondary markets for permissioned token assets. This implies that permissioned assets do not need to fully unlock transfer permissions; leveraging compliant market makers and regulated trading venues can similarly establish functional secondary markets.

The report emphasizes that turnover rate should not serve as a universal benchmark for measuring tokenization success or failure; evaluation criteria must align with each product's design intent. For yield-oriented treasury funds, the core metrics are performance and stable subscription/redemption capabilities; for tradable assets like equities and commodities, focus should be placed on slippage, bid-ask spreads, and market maker support; for collateral assets, attention must be given to the entire mechanism including lending caps, price feeds, and liquidation/redemption processes. Some treasury funds have extremely low turnover yet fulfill their product functions through issuer redemptions alone, which does not indicate product failure.

Next Phase: Programmable Markets, AI Agents Emerge as New Participants

In the next phase of tokenization, the industry will move beyond simple asset onboarding to programmable financial markets, with AI agents emerging as a entirely new class of market participants.

AI agents from Virtuals can now access Ondo tokenized equities. Financial assets are being converted into machine-readable standardized inventory, enabling software to autonomously search and execute trades. Circle's x402 internet payment protocol has already processed tens of millions of dollars in actual transactions.

During institutional adoption, privacy infrastructure and cross-chain interoperability have become hard requirements. Morpho launched encrypted vaults to protect user portfolio privacy. The DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation) is driving integration between traditional financial infrastructure and blockchain, while Oasis Pro Markets integrates with the DTCC fund service system to connect with the U.S. mutual fund industry's traditional operations network. Tokenization of real-world resources such as compute power and energy belongs to cutting-edge explorations in the machine economy, but currently remains mostly conceptual without forming a mature market.

Overall, the technical barriers to asset issuance have been overcome. The industry's true challenges now center on compliance, liquidity, and capital efficiency within secondary markets. Market differentiation is pronounced, with a large number of assets seeing virtually no public spot trading. Access rights profoundly impact trading activity, but permissioned assets can still unlock value through redemptions, permissioned trading, and collateralized lending; conclusions cannot be drawn solely based on turnover rates. Exposure demands do not necessarily rely on spot markets; perpetual derivatives generate massive synthetic trading volumes. Consumer platforms can boost trading activity but often lead to highly concentrated holdings. Private credit is already widely utilized as DeFi collateral, treasury money market funds suit a hold-and-redemption model, and equity assets heavily depend on DEX liquidity.

The industry's next core focus will not be issuing more tokens, but rather refining the underlying infrastructure for liquidation, privacy, and cross-system interoperability to enable more institutions and AI agents to safely utilize tokenized assets.

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