Real-World Assets in 2026: Adoption Is Real

Over the past year, the conversation around real-world assets (RWAs) has shifted.

What used to sound like a distant promise, putting real assets onchain, is now something large institutions, fintechs, and governments are actively experimenting with. Tokenized treasuries, private credit, revenue streams, and real estate are no longer edge cases. They’re live, being tested, and in some cases already generating volume.

From our perspective, RWAs are no longer a question of if. The real question is how, and where they actually make sense.

At WakeUp Labs, our perspective comes from working directly on tokenization systems in production, across very different asset types and constraints.

We’ve supported projects ranging from:

• Commodity tokenization, where onchain representations need to align with real-world supply, settlement cycles, and off-chain verification.

• Tokenized sports assets, including player-linked instruments that combine financial logic with regulatory and contractual complexity.

• Real estate tokenization, spanning different legal structures, jurisdictions, and liquidity models, where ownership, cash flows, and governance must coexist onchain and off-chain.

• Tokenized financial instruments, including stablecoin-based products, bonds, and equity-like assets, where settlement, compliance, and capital efficiency are non-negotiable.

Working across these domains has made one thing clear: the challenge is not just isn’t putting assets onchain, it’s designing systems that can operate reliably once they’re there. That hands-on exposure strongly shapes how we evaluate what’s real, what’s scalable, and what’s still mostly narrative in the RWA space.

The Adoption Signal Is Real

Most high-level RWA reports agree on a few things:

• Tokenized assets are moving from pilot programs to production.

• Institutional players are no longer watching from the sidelines. Countries like Argentina are already putting regulatory frameworks in place. 

• Stablecoins have become the default settlement layer, with the total market capitalization of dollar-pegged stablecoins surpassing $250 billion+ in 2025, and global transfer volumes frequently exceeding hundreds of billions per day, they’re not just held but actively used across markets. Source: Chainstack - https://chainstack.com/stablecoins-in-cross-border-settlements/

• Market infrastructure is improving: faster settlement, better collateral mobility, programmable flows.

When firms like BlackRock talk openly about a future where traditional assets and digital assets coexist in the same wallet, it’s a strong signal. This isn’t just crypto talking to itself anymore.

What’s Changing for RWAs — And Why It Matters Now

Across the ecosystem, we’re starting to see concrete shifts that directly address the frictions that held early RWA projects back:

First, infrastructure is catching up to off-chain reality.
New architectures are emerging that treat off-chain processes, settlement, verification, reporting, and reconciliation, as first-class components, rather than external afterthoughts. This reduces operational overhead and makes tokenized assets viable beyond controlled pilots.

Second, regulatory clarity is improving in key jurisdictions.
Several countries are moving from ambiguous frameworks to explicit rules around tokenized assets, custody, and investor protection. This doesn’t remove complexity, but it turns unknown risk into manageable constraints, a critical step for institutions and issuers operating at scale.

Third, user demand is becoming tangible.
Interest in fractional, on-chain access to traditionally illiquid assets, especially real estate, continues to grow. As more platforms enable compliant, smaller-ticket participation, tokenized ownership is shifting from a niche concept to a practical distribution model.

Taken together, these changes signal a transition: from RWAs as experimental products to RWAs as operational systems.

The complexity is still there, but it’s increasingly being designed around.

Tokenization doesn’t eliminate real-world constraints. What’s changing is that teams now have better tools, clearer rules, and real demand to justify building through them.

RWAs Are Not Just TradFi Copied Onchain

A common early approach to RWAs was simple replication: take an existing financial product and recreate it onchain.

Some of the most interesting progress we’re seeing now goes beyond that.

Especially in emerging markets, crypto-native RWA products are being designed around:

• New distribution models

• Alternative collateral structuresw

• Hybrid onchain/offchain flows

• Assets that didn’t previously fit into traditional financial rails

A key advantage of these approaches is liquidity and access. Tokenization lowers the barrier to entry, simplifies participation, and enables fractional exposure to assets that were historically hard to access or trade.

Where secondary markets are allowed to operate more freely, the full potential of RWAs starts to emerge. Tokenized assets can interact natively with onchain systems, from automated market making to lending, collateralization, and portfolio construction, unlocking behaviors that are simply not possible in traditional financial infrastructure.

That said, regulatory and compliance requirements still impose real constraints. In many jurisdictions, unrestricted secondary markets or deep DeFi composability won’t be immediately possible. But even within those boundaries, the shift is meaningful: liquidity improves, settlement becomes faster, and access broadens.

In several of the projects we’ve supported, the strongest outcomes didn’t come from mirroring traditional finance, but from rethinking how assets behave once programmability, automation, and global rails are assumed from day one.

These aren’t just digitized versions of old products. They’re new financial primitives built with blockchain constraints, and advantages, in mind.

What Scalable RWAs Will Look Like in 2026

As we move toward 2026, the RWA products are scaling.Some common patterns are already emerging:

• Compliance embedded by design, not added later

• Assets that can be used, not just held

• Clear risk classification, understandable to institutions

• Hybrid architectures that accept off-chain reality

• UX built for non-crypto users, without sacrificing control

Ownership is also changing. Tokenized assets are moving from passive claims to active, programmable components inside portfolios, usable as collateral, integrated into risk frameworks, and composable with other systems.

Final Thoughts

Real-world assets are entering a more honest phase.

The hype cycle is cooling, and what’s left is something more interesting: real products, real users, and real constraints. Adoption is happening, unevenly, imperfectly, but steadily.

From our experience building and supporting production systems, RWAs succeed when they’re treated less like tokens and more like infrastructure. When teams accept operational complexity instead of trying to abstract it away.

The next phase of RWAs won’t be defined by who tokenizes first, but by who can operate reliably once everything is onchain.