Tokenized repurchase agreements now average between $300 billion and $350 billion in daily volume, according to the International Monetary Fund's Global Financial Stability Report, released on October 8, 2026. The figure anchors one of the fund's most detailed assessments to date of on-chain collateralized lending — and it comes bundled with a clear warning: the market remains small, fragmented, and short on legal clarity.

The scale is verifiable at platform level. The Canton Network reported processing approximately $350 billion in daily repo volumes. Broadridge's Distributed Ledger Repo platform reported average daily volumes of $365 billion in July 2026, which added up to $8 trillion for the month. One 30-day moving average for tokenized repo volumes tracked close to $371 billion.

How big is the market, really?

A repo is a short-term loan structured as a sale: one party sells securities and agrees to buy them back later at a slightly higher price, effectively creating a collateralized loan. Tokenizing the process means recording the collateral and the agreement on a digital ledger rather than shuttling paperwork between back offices.

Those headline numbers shrink against the legacy market they aim to replace. The US repo market had approximately $4.6 trillion outstanding as of January 2026. Some analyses put daily US repo activity at around $13 trillion. Tokenized volume, in other words, is a fraction of the total — significant as a proof of concept, marginal as a share of the market.

The wider tokenized asset ecosystem tells a similar story. Tokenized real-world assets, excluding repos and stablecoins, were valued at approximately $65 billion as of July 2026:

• Bonds and money market funds: roughly $48 billion of the total
• Tokenized equities: approximately $2.3 billion
• More than half of some tokenized equity trading happens outside regular market hours

That after-hours activity is one of the more operationally consequential details in the report. Around-the-clock trading is a genuine structural feature of on-chain markets, not a marketing claim, and it has implications for collateral management, margin timing and risk monitoring at institutions accustomed to market close.

What does the IMF actually like?

The fund points to concrete efficiency gains. The headline benefit is atomic settlement — both sides of a trade complete at the same instant or not at all, eliminating the settlement gap that creates counterparty risk in traditional plumbing. The IMF also highlights 24/7 operations and reduced dependence on intermediaries.

These are not abstract benefits. Atomic settlement compresses the operational and credit risks that back offices spend heavily to manage, and fewer intermediaries means fewer points where collateral can sit idle or a trade can fail. For institutions running repo desks, that translates directly into capital and cost efficiency.

Why is the IMF worried?

The warnings are just as specific as the praise. The report flags three risk channels:

• Heightened liquidity strains during periods of stress
• Potential leverage built through collateral reuse
• Automated liquidations that can cascade without human intervention

Each of those could feed systemic contagion during periods of stress, the IMF cautions. The concern is not hypothetical: automated liquidation mechanics, which protect individual lenders, can become a transmission mechanism when many positions unwind simultaneously. Collateral reuse multiplies exposure in ways that are difficult to observe in real time across fragmented platforms.

Fragmentation itself compounds the problem. Volume is split across platforms — Canton, Broadridge's DLR and others — that do not yet interoperate cleanly, which limits netting efficiency and obscures aggregate leverage.

What is the regulatory prescription?

The IMF's ask is a technology-neutral regulatory framework: rules should apply to what an asset does, not whether it lives on a blockchain or in a legacy database. The fund wants equal treatment across asset types, legal clarity for tokenized assets, and standardization so platforms can interoperate.

The report's timing lines up with events hosted by the Bank of Korea, keeping the issue on the agenda of active standard-setters. With daily on-chain repo volume now in the same order of magnitude as a mid-sized sovereign debt market, the window for writing those rules before the next stress event — rather than after it — is narrowing.