Emerging Markets Are the Next Frontier of Tokenization — Starting With Listed Assets
Tokenization has proven the rails. The next phase is not about putting more of the same assets onchain. It is about bringing new markets, new issuers, and new supply into an internet-native capital system.
Tokenization no longer needs to be explained as a futuristic concept. It is already here, and it has already cleared the first institutional test.
Distributed real-world assets sit on public blockchains at meaningful scale today. Treasuries, private credit, commodities, and increasingly equities have shown that assets can be issued, held, settled, and distributed onchain under institutional conditions. The market has already moved.
That matters, because the debate is no longer whether tokenization works. The more interesting question is where tokenization creates the most new access — and where the supply side of the onchain economy will come from over the next five years.
The first wave went where it was easiest to go. Early tokenization concentrated in asset classes with strong legal clarity, high standardisation, daily pricing, familiar custody, and deep investor recognition. In other words, it started with markets that already had most of the ingredients needed to travel well across new rails. That phase was necessary. It validated the infrastructure.
But once the rails are proven, the opportunity shifts.
The composition matters more than the total. Tokenization has reached the assets that needed it least — US Treasuries, investment-grade credit, large-cap equities — while the categories where capital-market infrastructure does not yet exist remain almost entirely offline.
There is a second number that matters here, less often cited: roughly 89% of tokenized RWA value today sits in the top five wallets per asset class, and fewer than one in twenty holders transact monthly. Billions of dollars in tokenized assets sit onchain with almost no secondary activity around them. The first wave of tokenization did not just concentrate on the easiest asset classes; even inside those asset classes, the distribution problem is still unsolved.
This is not adoption in the way institutional capital usually understands it. It is the digital equivalent of a dark pool — tokenized, but not yet functional as a market. The infrastructure is in place. The supply side is not.
The first phase validated tokenization. The second phase expands its purpose.
The current tokenized market is still small relative to the scale of the global financial system. That is not a weakness — it is the point. The market is still early, but real.
Keyrock and Securitize project the distributed tokenized RWA market to reach $400 billion by 2030 — roughly a 13× expansion from where it sits today. Non-stablecoin RWAs grew 3.4× in 2025 alone. Institutional alternative funds grew 13× in fourteen months, from $185 million in January 2025 to $2.56 billion by March 2026. The trajectory is real. The question is which supply fills the next 13×.
The category is broadening. Tokenization is not ending at Treasuries and cash-equivalent products. It is moving into a phase where the question is no longer what is easiest to tokenize, but what is most valuable to bring onchain next.
For us, the answer is clear: markets where real assets exist, investor demand exists, but access and infrastructure remain underbuilt. That is the defining condition across much of the emerging world.
Emerging markets are the bigger half of the opportunity
Most of the world’s tokenized RWA narrative still revolves around the same small cluster of mature financial markets. The bigger macro opportunity sits elsewhere.
Emerging markets account for roughly 80% of global GDP growth, yet represent under 1% of tokenized assets in the current market. That asymmetry is one of the most important facts in the category — and one of the most underappreciated. It shows that tokenization has already validated itself in the places where infrastructure was already strong, while the larger untapped supply base remains almost entirely offline.
And that supply base is not theoretical. Across emerging markets there is already a deep reservoir of investable products: listed equities, ETFs, and funds; yield-bearing debt instruments; private credit; real estate; energy and infrastructure assets; and operating businesses with predictable cash flows. The issue is rarely that these assets do not exist. The issue is that they lack the legal packaging, digital workflows, distribution architecture, and institutional translation needed to reach capital beyond their domestic networks.
The opportunity is not just tokenization in new geographies. It is the creation of capital-market infrastructure in geographies where capital formation has historically depended more on relationships than on systems.
If you manage assets in a market where capital formation has always depended on personal relationships over formal systems — this is the infrastructure gap you have been living in. Tokenization will not change your world by refining US Treasury distribution. It will change it by building the rails where none exist.
Access is constrained not by lack of opportunity, but by fragmentation: fragmented data, fragmented distribution, fragmented compliance readiness, and fragmented pathways from local sponsors to international allocators. The assets may be real and the demand may be real, but the infrastructure that makes those assets legible to global capital is often missing. That is the gap Internet Capital Markets are meant to close.
Why listed assets come first
If emerging markets are the next frontier, the natural question is: where do you start?
Our view is that the best entry point is listed assets. That may sound less dramatic than private-market tokenization, but it is strategically stronger. Listed equities, ETFs, and funds in emerging markets are the most effective wedge because much of the hard work has already been done. They are already priced by the market, audited, and updated daily. They already have reference valuation, existing investor familiarity, and a cleaner regulatory path. In short, they are much easier to wrap, issue, and distribute than bespoke private-market deals.
Tokenized listed assets allow onchain distribution to expand without first solving every private-market complexity. They create faster paths to issuance, faster paths to adoption, and clearer paths to secondary utility. They are also more naturally compatible with the way internet-native capital behaves: movable, priced, comparable, and increasingly composable.
Private assets still matter enormously. They are where the long-term moat becomes deeper. But listed assets are where the market can enter first, prove distribution, and build the bridge between capital that already lives onchain and regions that have remained structurally inaccessible.
This is not a compromise. It is sequencing.
The real challenge is not minting tokens. It is curating supply.
The easiest mistake in tokenization is to think the innovation is finished once the token exists.
It is not.
Especially in emerging markets, the harder part begins before issuance. It begins with qualification. Which assets are suitable? Which issuers are credible? Which structures are realistic? Which offerings are understandable to professional allocators? Which projects can be distributed internationally without collapsing under due diligence, legal friction, or weak disclosure?
This is where the next category leaders will be different from the first generation of tokenization projects. The next leaders will not just be platforms that can tokenize. They will be curators who know how to source, filter, qualify, structure, and translate supply from underconnected markets into something global investors can actually underwrite. That requires a very different operating model from wrapping another Treasury product.
It requires local sourcing intelligence. It requires relationship-based origination. It requires institutional standards. And increasingly, it requires software and AI tools that can pre-screen issuers, identify missing inputs, accelerate onboarding, and organise fragmented data — without pretending that judgment can be fully automated.
The future of onchain finance does not need indiscriminate supply. It needs qualified supply. Not every asset belongs onchain. Not every issuer is ready. Not every opportunity should be distributed globally. The value is in building the systems — and the judgment — that can tell the difference.
Stablecoin growth creates a supply problem of its own
There is another reason this next phase matters now.
As stablecoins continue to grow, the amount of capital sitting onchain grows with them. That capital needs somewhere productive to go. At the beginning of a market cycle, cash-equivalent assets are enough to validate basic behaviour. Treasuries, money-market-like products, and simple yield-bearing instruments perform an important role. But an onchain financial system cannot mature on cash equivalents alone.
A real capital market needs a wider menu of assets. It needs instruments that support yield, portfolio construction, diversification, and eventually more sophisticated exposure management. It needs a mix of liquid and higher-yielding instruments across different sectors, risk profiles, and geographies. The more stablecoin-native capital grows, the more urgent that demand for broader supply becomes.
Internet Capital Markets need more than safe parking places for capital. They need investable opportunity sets. Bringing more diverse assets onchain is not a cosmetic expansion of the category — it is a structural requirement for a healthier onchain economy.
If stablecoins are the cash layer of this new system, tokenized real-world assets become the investment layer. And if that investment layer is going to deepen, it needs broader and more globally representative supply than it has today. Emerging markets are central to that evolution.
From tokenization to Internet Capital Markets
This is why we think the category is entering a new phase.
The first phase proved that tokenization works. The second phase will determine what it is for. If tokenization remains mostly an efficiency upgrade for assets already well-served by mature Western financial systems, it will still be valuable. But it will remain limited in its transformative effect.
The bigger opportunity is to use the same rails, legal innovation, and digital workflows to connect underrepresented markets to global capital more efficiently than legacy systems ever could.
That is the deeper promise of Internet Capital Markets for Emerging Economies. Not simply putting assets onchain. Not simply making settlement faster. But building the missing infrastructure layer that turns local opportunity into globally investable products.
That starts with listed assets, because they are the fastest path into market. It expands into curated private supply, because that is where the structural moat gets deeper. And it ultimately depends on something broader than tokenization itself: the ability to qualify, structure, distribute, and support real assets across borders with institutional credibility and digital-native efficiency.
That is the work ahead.
And that is where the next frontier begins.