By Bobby Ong, CEO and Co-founder, CoinGecko

The excitement about tokenizing real-world assets keeps growing. The numbers show a market that is still small, concentrated in bonds and gold, and increasingly traded through derivatives rather than the assets themselves.

The case for putting real-world assets on-chain has never been louder and more exciting. But it begs the question: what can you actually trade today?

To start, the hype isn’t hard to find. In the past few weeks Citigroup began tokenizing shares of private companies. JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo lined up behind a shared tokenized-deposit network. Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and London’s LSEG are each building tokenization platforms. BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev describe the shift as inevitable.

It helps to be precise about terms. Tokenization is the broad wave, and much of it is really about money, in the form of stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits and payment rails. Real-world assets, or RWAs, are the narrower and more investable slice, things like Treasuries, gold, stocks, credit and property, brought on-chain to be owned and traded. 

So how big is the market for RWA? Smaller than you might think. By early this year it stood at roughly $14 billion in January and $19 billion by March 2026, up about threefold since the start of 2025. But against the trillions in assets, it aims to represent, RWA is still a sliver of the total investible market.

Among RWAs, tokenized treasuries make up the largest share of market cap at roughly 67%. It crossed the $10B market cap mark for the first-time ever in February 2026, and has only continued to grow. However, these tokens are barely traded on the open market, often just held as part of project treasuries or reserves. 

About 30% of the remaining RWA market cap is in commodities, primarily tokenized gold, and these are the assets you can genuinely trade. Tokenized gold now moves in real size; spot volume in the first quarter alone totaled $90.7B, outpacing the whole of the previous year. Silver and Uranium have also seen volumes jump.

The Tokenization of stocks is the emerging story. Equities and funds together are only a low single-digit share of the market today at $1B in market cap]. Where they have launched, they change hands at a tiny fraction of the volume of the shares they mirror, though volume has been growing steadily. While, during the early days, there was a larger price gap between the tokenized stock and its real-life equivalent, spreads have narrowed quite significantly to track the actual market price. All these points to a market that is deepening in liquidity, and maturing quickly.

The tradable RWA market today, in other words, is mostly gold and stocks. More than two thirds of RWAs are tokenized treasuries that just sit idle.

There is one more finding, and it is the most striking. A large and growing share of RWA activity is not in the assets themselves, but in derivatives that track them. Perpetual futures – now commonly called ‘perps’ — on real-world assets turned over roughly $525 billion in the first quarter, with $7B in open interest, against an underlying market worth about $19 billion 

Most of that trading sits in commodities, with gold dominant and energy contracts such as oil beginning to appear. Total trading volume of commodities perps reached $525B in 2026 Q1 alone, close to double the total volume in 2025. A rising share of it runs through one venue in particular, the derivatives exchange Hyperliquid, whose RWA perpetual volumes jumped roughly tenfold last quarter. It now owns 46% of open interest for RWA perps, with about 20% share of trading volume.

The market for betting on real-world assets has already outgrown the market for owning them. Trading volume on RWA perps are already >10x the trading volume of spot RWA tokens.

None of this is a verdict against the idea of RWAs. Derivatives often lead the assets they track, and every market is small before it compounds. The parts that work, instant settlement and around-the-clock collateral, are working well.

So, the honest answer to what you can trade today is narrow. It is mostly gold and stock, often through derivatives, with everything else still early. And roughly $19 billion in real tokenized assets sits beneath a much larger layer of trading, with the whole market anchored to the oldest and safest stores of value there are. 

The interesting part for investors of all types is what comes next. How big can trading of commodities and stocks grow on-chain, and how quickly the rest of the financial markets such as credit, property, and alts come on-chain. RWA is truly one of the more fascinating stories in finance to watch unfold in the data in 2026.