Real estate gets the attention, but the same tokenization playbook applies to art, funds, and commodities - with the differences concentrated in custody and valuation, not the on-chain mechanics. A real-world asset becomes a token the same way each time: hold it in a legal structure, issue a compliant token, enforce eligibility. What changes is how you store the asset and how you price it. Here is what each of these asset classes needs.

The shared playbook

Whatever the asset, the core is the same: a legal wrapper that holds it, a compliant token representing a claim on that wrapper, a whitelist enforcing who can hold it, and - for a security - an exemption. The contracts barely change between asset types.

So "can I tokenize X?" is rarely a technology question. It is a question of whether you can custody the asset credibly and value it reliably. Those two things vary most by class.

Commodities: custody is everything

For a tokenized commodity - gold, metals - the asset is physical, so custody and auditing dominate. The token must map to specific, verifiable holdings in a vault, with regular attestation or proof of reserves.

Valuation is relatively easy (commodities have market prices), but trust rests entirely on the backing being real and verifiable. Get the custody and proof right and the rest follows.

Funds: structure and NAV

Tokenizing a fund means issuing tokenized units of a collective investment vehicle. The hard parts are the fund's legal structure and ongoing NAV - the token's value tracks the fund, so a reliable, regular valuation feed is essential.

This is why funds have been an early institutional success: the structures already exist, and tokenizing the units is an incremental step with clear valuation.

Art and collectibles: valuation is the challenge

Tokenizing art or collectibles is often fractional ownership of a unique, illiquid item. Custody (secure storage, provenance) matters, but the real difficulty is valuation - unique assets have no continuous market price, so values are appraisals, and liquidity is thin.

So art tokenization can work but demands honesty about pricing and exit. Treat valuation as the limiting factor, not an afterthought.

What this looks like in the wild

Real examples show how the custody-and-valuation split plays out. In commodities, Paxos's PAX Gold (PAXG) and Tether Gold (XAUT) each tokenize allocated London gold, with the token redeemable for specific bars and holdings attested regularly - custody and proof of reserves are the whole product, and Chainlink-style proof-of-reserve feeds are increasingly used to verify backing on-chain.

In funds, the early institutional wins are concrete: BlackRock's BUIDL, Franklin Templeton's BENJI, and Ondo's OUSG are tokenized money-market and treasury funds whose tokens track a published NAV. They worked first precisely because the legal structure already existed and the valuation is clean and daily.

Art is the hard case. Firms have tokenized works - Sygnum tokenized a Picasso, and various platforms offer fractional blue-chip art - but every one lives or dies on two things the backing cannot fix: an honest appraisal, since there is no continuous market price, and a realistic exit, since secondary liquidity is thin. In our experience the pattern holds across all of these - the contract is the easy 10%, and credible custody plus defensible valuation are the 90% that actually decides whether the deal is investable. Real estate sits between these cases - priced like property, custodied through the legal wrapper covered in its own guide - which is why it gets a dedicated walkthrough.

Where to go next

• Next: how to tokenize real estate.
• The investor's view: the investor's view of these assets.
• Glossary: tokenization.

Sources: rwa.xyz; protocol documentation, as of 2026.