The tokenization market in 2026: what was promised, what was measured
Four of the most-cited asset-tokenization forecasts — BCG, Citi, McKinsey and 21.co — set against the onchain value actually recorded in October 2026, with stablecoins excluded.
Measured figures read live from RWA.xyz on 25 October 2026, 05:20 UTC.
Every headline forecast put tokenization between $2 trillion and $16.1 trillion by 2030. The measured onchain market excluding stablecoins is $39.02 billion — roughly 0.24% of BCG's $16.1 trillion target with about four of its eight years elapsed. The gap is not a rounding error; it is two to three orders of magnitude, and it survives every reasonable choice of what to count.
Measured today, stablecoins excluded
Distributed asset value
$39.02B
+0.93% vs 30d ago. Tokens movable off-platform and transferable peer-to-peer.
Represented asset value
$389.97B
+8.11% vs 30d ago. Tokens walled inside an issuing platform.
Total stablecoin value
$289.66B
−1.83% vs 30d ago. Excluded from the figures above.
Total asset holders
5,316,535
Stablecoin holders alone: 300.52M.
Which number is "the market"? RWA.xyz defaults to the Distributed view — tokens that can leave the issuing platform and move wallet-to-wallet. That is the strictest defensible reading of "tokenized onchain", and it is $39.02B. Adding platform-walled Represented assets gives $428.99B. Both exclude stablecoins. The choice matters: the generous reading is still 2.7% of BCG's 2030 number.
The forecasts and their dates
Publisher & report
Date
Forecast for 2030
Scope as stated
BCG + ADDX "Relevance of On-chain Asset Tokenization in 'Crypto Winter'"
12 Sep 2022
$16.1T
50× growth from 2022; ~10% of global GDP. Illiquid assets — real estate, art, private equity.
Citi GPS "Money, Tokens, and Games"
30 Mar 2023
$5T
Tokenized digital securities.
Citi GPS "Tokenization 2030 — Wall Street On-Chain" (revised)
1 Jun 2026
$5.5T base $8T bull
Tokenized assets; U.S. equities and treasuries as early drivers.
McKinsey "From ripples to waves: The transformational power of tokenizing assets"
20 Jun 2024
~$2T
Explicitly excluding cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and stablecoins like Tether.
21.co "The State of Tokenization"
Oct 2023
$3.5T–$10T
Range framed as the 2030 "opportunity".
How far reality sits from each forecast
Measured $39.02B as a share of each 2030 target.
BCG + ADDX — $16.1T
0.24%
21.co high — $10T
0.39%
Citi 2026 base — $5.5T
0.71%
21.co low — $3.5T
1.11%
McKinsey — $2T
1.95%
Where reality diverged
The forecast range was itself a 8× spread. McKinsey's $2T and BCG's $16.1T describe the same phenomenon in the same decade. A forecast whose error bar spans $14 trillion cannot be used to plan anything, and 2026's measured $39.02B sits below the bottom of it.
Stablecoins did the tokenizing; securities did not. Stablecoins are $289.66B — 7.4× the entire distributed RWA market. The one tokenized asset class that reached real scale is the one every 2030 forecast excluded from its headline.
"Represented" assets are where the growth went. $389.97B of assets are tokenized but still walled inside issuing platforms, versus $39.02B that are genuinely transferable. Tokenization arrived as a better back-end for fund administration, not as an open onchain market. That is precisely the "record-keeping only" category a strict definition excludes.
Holders, not value, is the tell. 5.3M total asset holders against 300.52M stablecoin holders — a 56× gap. Tokenized funds and private credit have real balances but almost no retail distribution.
The forecasters revised downward, not upward. Citi moved from $5T (2023) to a $5.5T base case (2026) after three more years of data — a 10% raise across a period when the measured market grew from tens of billions. The 2026 report reframes the story around "liquid collateral" and U.S. equities, i.e. the parts that are actually working.
21.co's own baseline included stablecoins. Its October 2023 measurement of $118.57B in tokenized assets attributed Ethereum's 58% share ($69.16B) "primarily to the amount of stablecoins issued" on the network. Strip stablecoins and the 2023 base was far smaller than the headline implied.
Timing, not direction, was wrong. Every forecast has the mechanism right — private markets, treasuries, funds, collateral. What they missed is that the binding constraint was distribution and legal wrappers, not blockchain throughput, so the curve is a slow S, not a 50× step.
Method and caveats
Forecast figures are quoted from each publisher's own page or report. Measured figures are RWA.xyz's live dashboard on 25 October 2026, 05:20 UTC, and move continuously — treat them as a snapshot, not a constant. RWA.xyz classifies an asset as Distributed only if the token can move to a wallet outside the issuing platform and transfer peer-to-peer; Represented covers platform-walled tokens. Stablecoins are reported separately and are excluded from both RWA figures. BCG's $310B 2022 base year is as reported in coverage of the report; the report's own headline is the $16.1T 2030 figure and the 50× multiple.
Sources
Source
Date
Link
BCG — Relevance of On-chain Asset Tokenization in 'Crypto Winter'