Tokenized real-world assets under management reached $34.18 billion as of September 15, 2026, up 85.2% year to date, according to a new report from Binance Research, the research arm of the Binance exchange.

The report, titled "The RWA Activation Era," argues the tokenization sector has entered a second phase in which the key question is no longer how much traditional value gets wrapped into tokens, but what that value does once it exists onchain — whether it sits idle in wallets or circulates through trading, lending, liquidity provision and collateral markets.

Market composition

Bonds and money market funds remain the largest category at $18.29 billion, accounting for more than half of total market value. Equities posted the fastest growth of any segment, expanding 390.4% year to date. Together, bonds, money market funds and equities drove more than three-quarters of the market's overall growth this year.

Binance Research also flags rising activity in gold, commodities, private credit and real estate, indicating that tokenization is broadening beyond crypto-native collateral into a wider range of traditional asset classes.

Scale remains marginal

Despite the headline growth, tokenized assets represent only about 0.01% of the traditional markets they reference, the report finds. Equities illustrate the gap most clearly: onchain volume for tokenized stocks stands at $4.43 billion — just 0.0029% of the $151.9 trillion public equities market. Even the fastest-growing RWA category barely registers against the scale of traditional finance.

New metrics: PAR and CAR

To measure the difference between issuance and usage, Binance Research introduced two metrics. The Programmable Asset Ratio (PAR) captures how much of a given underlying market is represented as a programmable onchain asset. The Capital Activation Rate (CAR) tracks the share of that tokenized base actually deployed in onchain financial applications such as liquidity pools, lending protocols and collateral markets.

Across the entire RWA market, PAR sits at roughly 0.01%, while CAR comes in around 12% — meaning that for every $100 of tracked tokenized assets, roughly $12 is actively deployed in onchain finance. The distinction matters operationally: a low PAR shows the market remains small relative to traditional finance, while a rising CAR shows tokenized value is increasingly being put to work rather than left dormant.

Activation varies sharply by asset class

The aggregate CAR figure conceals wide divergence between categories. Private credit leads with a CAR of 49.67%, meaning nearly half of all tokenized private credit is actively deployed in onchain financial activity. Tokenized equities posted one of the steepest gains, with CAR climbing from 1.95% at the start of 2026 to 7.54% — a fourfold increase pointing to growing appetite for using tokenized stocks beyond simple custody.

Within DeFi, usage of tokenized equities skews heavily toward liquidity provision. Liquidity pools account for 65.4% of tokenized equities' total value locked in DeFi, with a further 28.1% deployed in lending. Those two applications together represent 93.5% of all deployed value, indicating that when tokenized stocks are activated, they overwhelmingly serve market-making and credit functions rather than more complex financial strategies.

2030 scenarios

Drawing on its earlier "Tokenization's Trillion-Dollar Runway" report, Binance Research sketches conservative, base and bull-case scenarios for tokenized equities by 2030 of roughly $61 billion, $349 billion and $987 billion respectively. Measured against the current $4.43 billion onchain balance, those outcomes would imply a PAR of roughly 0.04%, 0.23% and 0.65% by the end of the decade.

The report notes that while higher assets under management should lift PAR, CAR does not necessarily follow the same trajectory — it depends on whether liquidity, lending and collateral applications scale in step with issuance or lag behind it. Binance Research identifies this as the sector's central strategic tension: growth could come from bringing more capital onchain, from making capital already there more usable, or from both at once.

The strongest forward signal for the industry, the report concludes, would be PAR and CAR rising together — evidence that tokenization is shifting from a one-time issuance event into a repeatable financial function, with assets cycling through onchain markets rather than sitting on a blockchain as static records. Whether that convergence materializes will become clearer as the market tests whether onchain liquidity and credit infrastructure can keep pace with the accelerating pace of token issuance.