The real-world assets being tokenized today fall into five main classes: private credit, US Treasuries, institutional funds, commodities, and real estate. Private credit and Treasuries dominate by value, while real estate - the asset people associate most with tokenization - is still the smallest slice on-chain. Each class has a different set of leaders, a different reason to be on a blockchain, and a different risk profile, so "RWA" is really a map of several markets, not one.

Key takeaways

• A real-world asset can be almost anything of value off-chain, but on-chain value concentrates in a handful of classes.
• As of 2026, private credit and tokenized Treasuries hold the most value; commodities and real estate are much smaller.
• The classes that grew first are the ones with simple cash flows and clear demand - short-term yield and institutional credit.
• Who leads differs by class: asset managers in Treasuries and funds, crypto-native protocols in credit, specialist issuers in property and gold.

What gets tokenized, and why?

Any asset with a clear owner and a predictable cash flow is a candidate. In practice, the market moved first to assets that are easy to value and easy to sell: short-term government debt, business loans, and money-market funds. These have transparent pricing and steady yield, so putting them on-chain adds speed and access without adding guesswork about what the thing is worth.

Harder assets - a single building, a bar of gold, a piece of art - can be tokenized too, but they carry valuation and liquidity friction that slows adoption. That is why the market map does not match most people's intuition: tokenized real estate gets the headlines, but tokenized credit and Treasuries hold far more value.

The five asset classes

Here is how on-chain value splits across the main classes, using illustrative figures as of 2026.

Tokenized US Treasuries

Tokenized Treasuries are short-term US government debt wrapped in a token that pays yield on-chain. They grew from near zero in 2023 to roughly $8B outstanding by 2026, led by funds from BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Ondo. The appeal is simple: a dollar-denominated, government-backed yield that settles in minutes and plugs directly into on-chain systems.

Private credit

Tokenized private credit - loans to businesses, packaged and funded on-chain - is the largest class by value, around $16B as of 2026. Protocols like Figure, Maple, and Centrifuge originate or fund loans and issue tokens that represent a share of the repayments. Yields are higher than Treasuries because the risk is higher: these are private borrowers, not governments.

Real estate

Tokenized real estate divides a specific property into fractions so investors can hold a slice of the rent and any sale gain. Despite the attention it gets, it is the smallest major class on-chain - a few hundred million dollars as of 2026 - because each property needs its own legal wrapper, valuation, and buyer. RealT and a handful of specialists lead here.

Funds

Tokenized funds put a share class of a traditional fund - usually a money-market or institutional fund - directly on-chain. This overlaps with Treasuries, since many of the largest tokenized Treasury products are structured as funds. Asset managers lead this class, because the underlying product and distribution are already theirs.

Commodities

Tokenized commodities are mostly gold, where each token is backed by a specific quantity of physical metal in a vault. Paxos tokenizes 400-oz gold bars, and the total gold-token market sits around $2B as of 2026. Commodities are a small but steady class: the backing is easy to verify and the demand is a familiar store-of-value trade.

Who leads each class?

The leaders are not the same from one class to the next. Asset managers dominate Treasuries and funds; crypto-native protocols dominate credit; specialists own property and gold.

The pattern tells you something. Where the asset is already a packaged financial product - a fund, government debt - the incumbents with the product and the distribution moved in. Where the asset needed new origination rails or a new kind of legal structure, crypto-native firms built it first. Note that stablecoins, at over $250B, dwarf every RWA class, but they are usually counted separately because they are cash, not an income-producing asset.

Which class should you look at first?

Match the class to what you actually want. For low-risk, dollar-denominated yield, tokenized Treasuries and money-market funds are the most mature and liquid. For higher yield and willingness to take credit risk, private credit is the deepest market. For a tangible single-asset stake, real estate and commodities exist but are smaller and often less liquid.

Across all of them, the rule is the same: the on-chain figures track total value locked in these products, but value is not quality. Judge each token by its underlying asset and its legal structure, not by which class is largest.

Where to go next

• Next: why tokenized assets are securities and what that means for who can buy.
• See the live numbers: RWA market data and trends.
• Glossary: real-world asset.

Sources: rwa.xyz, as of 2026.