By Ivan Kroshnyi, founder of SharPay
I spent more than a decade in trading before moving deeper into investing and building businesses. One distinction becomes very clear when you have spent enough time around markets: having an asset, having a price for that asset and being able to exit a position at that price are three different things.
Tokenisation does not change that. The technology can make ownership easier to record. It can divide an asset into smaller units. It can reduce settlement friction and allow those units to move outside traditional market hours. All of that matters. But none of it guarantees that another investor will be willing to buy the asset when you want to sell it, in the size you need, at a price close to the one displayed on your screen. That distinction is becoming more important as the tokenised asset market grows.
BeInCrypto Research recently tracked roughly $60 billion in tokenised real world assets across more than 7,000 products. Of the 1,289 assets above $100,000 that it examined for transfer activity, 910, worth $32.9 billion, recorded no transfers during the week studied. Just 62 assets represented 88% of total market value. BeInCrypto Research: The Real State of Tokenization in 2026. Those numbers sound like evidence of a liquidity crisis. I think the reality is more interesting.
A token that does not move is not automatically illiquid
The first mistake is treating onchain activity as a direct substitute for liquidity. BeInCrypto makes an important distinction between Distributed and Represented assets. Around $27 billion of the dormant value in its study consisted of Represented assets, where blockchain is used primarily as a digital record of an offchain position rather than as a public trading rail. Low transfer activity can therefore be completely consistent with the way some of those products were designed. BeInCrypto: Half of the $60 Billion Tokenization Market Has No Real Activity
An investor may also hold an asset for months while retaining a clear redemption mechanism. Another token might change wallets every day but have very little depth when somebody tries to sell a large position. Transaction activity tells us something. It does not tell us everything. The more useful question is whether an investor has a credible route from ownership back to cash. That is where tokenisation and liquidity separate.
Transferability is an infrastructure feature. Liquidity is a market outcome
Blockchain can remove technical barriers to transfer. It cannot manufacture the economic conditions required for an active market. Liquidity requires buyers, sellers, market makers, capital willing to warehouse risk, credible valuation and confidence in the legal and economic rights attached to the asset. Consider fractionalisation. Dividing an asset into smaller units can widen the pool of people capable of buying it. That is valuable, particularly for assets that traditionally require large minimum investments. But reducing the minimum ticket from $100,000 to $100 does not create demand for an asset nobody wants.
The same applies to continuous trading. A market being technically available 24 hours a day is different from that market having sufficient depth 24 hours a day. An investor does not benefit much from being able to submit an order at 2am if the spread is enormous or there is no meaningful bid for the position. Traditional markets have spent decades building the institutions that sit behind liquidity. Market makers, exchanges, clearing systems, research, custody, disclosure standards and large pools of capital all contribute to the ability to transact. Putting an asset onchain changes the infrastructure. It does not allow us to skip the process of building a market around it.
Headline AUM is therefore the wrong scoreboard
The tokenisation industry understandably celebrates assets under management. Growing AUM shows that issuers and investors are becoming comfortable putting real financial value onto blockchain infrastructure. But AUM measures how much value has entered a structure. It does not tell us how efficiently that value can leave. For an institutional investor, I would want to understand at least four things before treating a tokenised asset as meaningfully liquid.
First, what exactly do I own?
A token can represent direct ownership, a claim on an issuer, an interest in a fund or synthetic economic exposure. Those structures can behave very differently when an investor wants to exit. The technical similarity of the tokens should not obscure differences in the underlying rights.
Second, who will buy from me?
Issuance tells us about supply. Liquidity requires demand. Investors should look at actual turnover, the number and quality of active counterparties, spreads and available depth at realistic transaction sizes. A market that can absorb a $5,000 sale is not necessarily capable of absorbing a $5 million one.
Third, what is my path back to cash?
Secondary trading is only one source of liquidity. Some products have issuer or fund redemption mechanisms that matter more than wallet to wallet transfers. The important question is not simply whether the token traded yesterday. It is what happens when I need to exit tomorrow, how the redemption price is determined, how long the process takes and who provides the cash.
Fourth, where is the liquidity located?
Tokenisation can solve fragmentation, but it can also create it. If economically similar exposure exists across several chains, exchanges, wrappers, and jurisdictions, total market value may look appealing while actual liquidity is divided among many smaller pools. For institutional investors, interoperability matters because twenty technically accessible pools do not necessarily equal one deep market.
Concentration is not necessarily a sign of failure
The fact that 62 assets account for 88% of tokenised market value may look uncomfortable. I would be careful about concluding that this is inherently unhealthy. BeInCrypto Research: market concentration data. New markets rarely mature evenly. Institutional capital naturally moves first toward assets with familiar economics, clearer valuation, established issuers and predictable redemption.
BeInCrypto's research found that tokenised US Treasuries were the only one of the twelve asset classes it assessed as having reached what it describes as “production-grade” maturity. BeInCrypto: Only One Asset Class Is Ready for Prime Time Concentration can therefore be evidence of selection. The more important test is what happens next. Does liquidity gradually expand from a handful of successful products into a broader range of assets? Do market makers commit capital? Do investors begin using these instruments as collateral? Does secondary turnover develop? Do assets become usable across platforms rather than remaining isolated inside individual ecosystems?
If those things happen, today's concentration may simply represent an early stage of market formation. If issuance keeps expanding while actual market depth remains confined to a small group of products, then the industry has a different problem. It will have succeeded at digitising assets without succeeding at creating digital capital markets.
Tokenisation still matters
None of this is an argument against tokenisation. Better settlement, programmable ownership, fractional access and more efficient record keeping can materially improve financial infrastructure. These are significant advantages even when the asset itself remains relatively illiquid.
But investors should be precise about what technology has solved. An illiquid private asset does not become liquid because its ownership record moves onto a blockchain. A weak market does not become deep because trading hours extend to 24/7. Fractional ownership increases the number of people who can theoretically participate, but not necessarily the number who actually will. The next stage of tokenisation should therefore be judged less by how many assets we can put onchain and more by the quality of the markets we build around them.
For investors, the question is changing from “Can this asset be tokenised?” to “What can I actually do with the token once I own it?”
That is a healthier question for the industry.
The technology has already demonstrated that assets can move differently. The harder task now is proving that capital will move with them.
