2026 On-chain RWA Mid-Year Report: The market value of tokenized stocks doubled in a year, but 90% of the rights are 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 real legal validity lack liquidity. This report dissects how much of this "$1.89 billion market" is genuine, serving as a wake-up call for any investor considering positioning in on-chain securities.

The stock market has not moved on-chain. What has emerged is a more credible 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 in March 2026 to $1.89 billion in July, nearly doubling. However, this growth primarily comes from a few products and platforms.

The most significant progress comes from regulated market infrastructure, particularly 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 stronger product-market fit, while stock ETFs may scale more easily than individual stocks.

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

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

The State of Onchain Real-World Assets

What Substantial Changes Have Occurred Since 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. Under the framework of RWA.xyz, "represented assets" stay 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 judge 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: focusing not on unrestricted portability, but on legal certainty, controlled wallets, compliant custody, transfer agent records, and integration with the 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 these four elements at scale: standard ownership, widespread wallet distribution, institutional liquidity, and independent on-chain price discovery.

Figure: Summary Statistics of Onchain Real-World Assets (As of July 28, totaling approximately $36.78 billion, 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, and the represented value is $218.27 billion. The represented value has superficially decreased by $12.43 billion, which should not be interpreted as capital outflow or a wave of redemptions. 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 because 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 raised funds by issuing 4.375 million blockchain shares at $32 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 Headline Number 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 excludes balances identified as treasury holdings or pre-minted inventory. The bridged number 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 differs from free-floating shares. Free-floating 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 total distributed value on July 27 was $1.8879 billion, consistent with the approximately $1.88 billion displayed on the dashboard. The snapshot from July 29 across platforms and networks totaled about $1.872 billion.

The difference of $15.8 million accounts for 0.84%, consistent with the changes in prices 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 items, categorized by issuing platform and network, with FGRS at approximately $191 million)

Three named tools contributed about half of the incremental increase: SECZ added $169 million post-listing, FGRS added $162.9 million, and STRCx added $126.6 million. Together, they contributed $458.6 million, accounting for 49% of the total increment of $936.8 million. Long-tail products contributed an additional $150.5 million, 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 growths collectively as "inflows into tokenized stocks" merges several economically distinct events into a single potentially misleading number.

Concentration is more apparent at the platform level. In the snapshot from July 29, Ondo and xStocks together accounted for 72.7% of 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 has not yet unified on a legal level. Multiple tokens can simultaneously reference Apple Inc. stock or the S&P 500 ETF, but each is an independent legal liability, subject to 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.