By Nic Puckrin, CEO and co-founder of Coin Bureau
Tokenised real-world assets have seen explosive growth so far this year. Total RWA assets have jumped 26% year-to-date to $26.78 billion, according to data from RWA.xyz. The most pronounced growth was in the tokenised commodities sector, where assets soared 62.5% YTD to $5.77 billion at the time of writing.
That’s a huge jump, at a time when the market cap of digital assets overall has plummeted. But it’s not just the growth that matters, it’s what this growth reveals about investor sentiment and capital flows. The total assets are still small by global market standards, but they herald a big structural shift.
RWAs are not just acting as a new investment wrapper, like ETFs. Rather, they are creating an entirely new liquidity layer for real assets. One that operates outside of traditional market hours, but is increasingly acting as the price discovery mechanism. For now, it’s mostly precious metals, but soon it could be equities, bonds, and more. We are only beginning to understand the full implications of this shift.
The new liquidity layer
Commodities have been the first proof of concept, with tokenised gold the most obvious initial use case for RWA tokenisation. The price of the shiny metal is up 17.7% YTD, and investors have been increasingly accessing it via blockchain-based products. The two largest – Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG) – have taken in the lion's share of the inflows this year.
But it’s not just the appetite for gold that’s interesting here; it’s the fact that tokenisation is facilitating the creation of a parallel market that runs 24/7. On weekends, amid geopolitical shocks and Friday night announcements, traders can now buy or sell gold during hours when traditional exchanges are closed. During volatile times, the on-chain gold market is becoming the primary market.
This is a sign of a much bigger shift toward the tokenisation of everything. And this has profound consequences for both the structure of the digital asset market and the underlying assets now increasingly traded on it.
The weekend gap
The clearest evidence for this new dynamic is what happens when traditional markets close. 24/7 trading exposes a weekend gap that leads to a bifurcation in underlying assets, particularly during high-volatility events. During weekend trading, tokenised gold absorbs the volatility of the underlying asset. Considering that a large proportion of major, market-moving announcements have been made late on a Friday during President Trump's administration, this weekend gap is particularly meaningful.
Take the current war in Iran, for example. When the first strikes hit, tokenised gold jumped to a premium on tokenised exchanges. PAXG rose 2.2% to $5,344/oz, while Tether Gold had climbed to $5,292/oz (+1.2%). Then, spot markets followed this move on Monday, with spot gold rising nearly 2% to reach $5,368-$5,390. Almost exactly where PAXG was trading over the weekend, in fact. There are other examples where the price overshot somewhat in on-chain gold markets over the weekend and reversed come Monday, but the trend is broadly the same.
Bifurcation of capital flows
And this reveals a very interesting dynamic: a market that has essentially split into two. The spot market, where the normal weekday trading happens, and the on-chain market, which essentially acts as a price discovery mechanism that sets traders up for the Monday morning move. The on-chain market is no longer following spot. In the moments that matter most, it is leading it.
Investors – and increasingly, these are institutional investors – are turning to on-chain markets when their traditional intermediaries are unavailable. It’s a workaround to avoid the constraints of traditional trading hours. When a war starts on a Saturday night, the most efficient way to access investment markets is the one that wins. And news flow hasn’t exactly been following office hours of late.
That’s a major liquidity shift. For the first time in decades, traditional financial assets like equities, bonds and derivatives are no longer the most accessible or the most tradeable. A tokenised gold position is, in fact, more liquid at 11pm on a Saturday than a listed equity. This throws the volatility and risk profiles based on traditional Monday-Friday patterns out of the window, and it will continue changing as more and more asset classes become tokenised.
Volatility, correlations and the equity market
It's fascinating on its own, but it's particularly interesting because discussions around 24/7 equity trading have intensified of late. Not long ago, Nasdaq announced plans to partner with Kraken, a leading digital asset exchange, for 24/7 trading. It's been on the cards for a while, and for a while, the pros and cons have been debated. Now, it's starting to feel a lot more real.
The gold example is instructive here too. If traders can react to Friday night earnings or a Saturday piece of news immediately, the Monday morning shock disappears. But the price move doesn't. And if liquidity is low because fewer people are trading on the weekend, this could create short-term price shocks in equities that we have seen in the crypto market on the back of major news. Retail investors trading on weekends could feel this particularly acutely.
But there is also a flip side. If equity markets go 24/7, some of the speculative energy that currently flows into crypto and tokenised assets during off-hours may migrate back into stocks. The volatility that tokenised gold currently absorbs on a Saturday night might, in a world of 24/7 equities, be distributed differently across asset classes. It certainly fundamentally changes the models that professional investors have relied on for decades.
The impact this will eventually have is genuinely hard to predict. But it’s clear the market is reshaping itself entirely with the advent of tokenised securities. Investors would do well to start with a simple question: how many of their risk models were built on price histories that only capture Monday to Friday? Because the market that generated those numbers no longer exists.
The author holds positions in digital assets. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
About Nic Puckrin: Nic Puckrin is CEO and co-founder of Coin Bureau. Nic Puckrin is a former Goldman Sachs quantitative analyst and Imperial College Financial Engineering graduate who has spent over a decade analysing macro drivers and institutional capital flows in digital asset markets. He is co-founder and CEO of Coin Bureau, a research-led digital asset analysis platform.
