How will tokenised assets change in 2026? The march towards a $35tn market starts now

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Hi! Eric here.

Tokenisation is becoming the next frontier in Wall Street’s aggressive campaign to bulldoze into crypto.

In 2025, centralised players like Robinhood, Kraken and Superstate launched tokenised stocks on their platforms, enabling 24/7 trading of digital exposure to company shares.

That’s just the beginning, industry insiders tell DL News.

“In 2026, the tokenised assets market becomes broader, deeper, and significantly more institutional,” Philipp Pieper, co-founder of tokenisation platform Swarm Markets, told DL News.

He and others expect tokenisation to veer more deeply into private markets, which include assets like private equity and credit, and have so far mostly been the purview of institutional players.

This will give retail investors access to a market that investment giant BlackRock estimates will grow by 53% to be worth $20 trillion by 2030.

Other areas primed for onchain adoption include public market assets such as equities, exchange-traded funds, indices, commodities, and yield-bearing instruments.

This combination will drive a thousand-fold growth of tokenised assets, pushing their combined value to $35 trillion by 2030, according to Grayscale.

The bullishness around tokenisation highlights how traditional finance has merged with that of crypto.

Digital assets were once treated like the unwanted stepchild of finance, but a combination of regulatory clarity, political will, and industry maturity has triggered a wave of institutional buy-in.

Wall Street giants have ploughed billions into crypto ETFs, considered launching their own stablecoins, and are tapping into blockchain infrastructure like never before.

So far, tokenisation efforts have mainly resulted in walled gardens where traders can only buy and sell digital exposure to assets like shares on each platform.

“Fragmentation remains the biggest challenge [to tokenisation],” Mark Greenberg, Kraken’s global head of consumer, told DL News.

This, he said, prevents tokenisation from reaching “its full potential when assets are open, interoperable, and easy to move between centralised and decentralised environments, while remaining fully collateralised by the underlying assets.”

Another challenge for tokenisation will be regulatory clarity, for instance around geolocking where products have different regulatory requirements depending on where they are in the world.

“Once we have a clear regulatory framework for crypto in place, I think we will see faster adoption and innovation across the industry,” Johann Kerbrat, SVP and GM of Robinhood Crypto, told DL News.

Even so, most industry insiders DL News spoke to view 2026 with a sense of bullish anticipation.

“We’re moving from pilots to infrastructure,” Jim Hiltner, co-founder of Superstate, told DL News. “Tokenised assets will start to look less like a niche category and more like a new operating layer for capital markets.”

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