A brand new fourth quarter 2025 survey from tokenization platform Brickken suggests that almost all of real-world asset (RWA) issuers are utilizing tokenization to boost capital quite than to unlock secondary market liquidity, in keeping with a report shared with CoinDesk.
Amongst respondents, 53.8% stated capital formation and fundraising effectivity is their principal purpose for tokenizing, whereas 15.4% stated the necessity for liquidity was their principal incentive. One other 38.4% stated liquidity was not wanted, whereas 46.2% stated they anticipate secondary market liquidity inside six to 12 months.
“What we’re seeing is a shift away from tokenization as a buzzword and towards tokenization as a monetary infrastructure layer,” Jordi Esturi, CMO at Brickken, informed CoinDesk. “Issuers are utilizing it to resolve actual issues: capital entry, investor attain, and operational complexity.”
Brickken’s report comes as main U.S. inventory exchanges announce plans to increase buying and selling fashions for tokenized property, together with 24/7 markets. CME Group said they will offer around-the-clock trading for its crypto derivatives by Might 29, whereas the New York Inventory Change (NYSE) and Nasdaq shared their plans to offer 24/7 tokenized inventory buying and selling.
Esturi stated the exchanges’ plans have extra to do with enterprise mannequin evolution than with an issuer demand disconnect. “It’s much less about getting forward of demand and extra about exchanges evolving their enterprise mannequin,” he stated. “Exchanges enhance income by growing buying and selling quantity, and increasing buying and selling hours is a pure lever.”
On the identical time, many issuers are nonetheless in what he described because the section of validation, throughout which they show regulatory buildings, check investor urge for food and digitize issuance processes. “Liquidity will not be but their main focus as a result of they’re constructing foundations,” he emphasised, including that they view tokenization as “the upstream engine that feeds buying and selling venues.”
The Brickken CMO additionally stated that with out compliant, structured, high-quality property coming into the market, secondary buying and selling platforms don’t have anything significant to commerce. “The true worth creation occurs on the issuance layer,” Esturi famous.
Non-obligatory liquidity versus obligatory
Whereas 38.4% of surveyed issuers stated liquidity was not required, Esturi identified the distinction between “non-obligatory liquidity and obligatory liquidity,” noting that many non-public market issuers function on long-term horizons. “Liquidity is inevitable, but it surely should scale in parallel with issuance quantity and institutional adoption, not forward of it.”
Ondo, which started with tokenized U.S. Treasuries and now has greater than $2 billion in property, is concentrated on shares and ETFs particularly as a result of of their “robust value discovery, deep liquidity and clear valuation,” Chief Technique Officer Ian de Bode stated in a recent interview with CoinDesk.
“You tokenize one thing both to make it simpler to entry or to make use of it as collateral,” de Bode stated. “Shares match each, and so they value like property individuals truly perceive, in contrast to a constructing in Manhattan. If TradFi strikes to 24/7, that’s a godsend,” de Bode added. “It’s our largest bottleneck.”
The survey shows that tokenization is already operational for a lot of members: 69.2% of respondents reported finishing the tokenization course of and being dwell, 23.1% are in progress, and seven.7% are nonetheless within the planning section.
Laws are nonetheless a problem
Regulation is a significant concern amongst these surveyed: 53.8% of respondents stated regulation slowed their operations, whereas 30.8% reported partial or contextual regulatory friction. In complete, 84.6% skilled some stage of regulatory drag. By comparability, 13% cited know-how or growth challenges as the toughest half of tokenization.
“Compliance isn’t one thing issuers are coping with after launch; it’s one thing they’re bearing in mind and configuring from day one,” stated Alvaro Garrido, founding accomplice at Authorized Node. “We see an growing demand for authorized buildings tailor-made to the precise challenge wants and underlying know-how.”
The report additionally suggests tokenization is increasing past actual property. Actual property accounted for 10.7% of property tokenized or deliberate for tokenization, in contrast with 28.6% for fairness/shares and 17.9% for IP and entertainment-related property. Respondents spanned sectors together with know-how platforms (31.6%), leisure (15.8%), non-public credit score (15.8%), renewable power (5.3%), banking (5.3%), carbon property (5.2%), aerospace (5.3%) and hospitality (5.2%).
“The true bridge between TradFi and DeFi will not be ideological,” stated Patrick Hennes, head of digital asset servicing at DZ PRIVATBANK. “It’s issuance infrastructure that interprets regulatory necessities, investor safety and asset servicing requirements into programmable methods.”
