By Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget

Tokenized equities have just tripled their share of the real-world-asset market to around 15 percent, a combined market cap near 2.8 billion dollars, with Ondo, Binance and Kraken’s xStocks leading the charge. The headline writes itself: Wall Street is moving on-chain, and around-the-clock access to US stocks has finally arrived. That part is true. It is also the easy half of the story.

The harder half is size. A tokenized version of Apple or Nvidia that you can buy is not the same as one you can sell at scale when you need to. Across most of the market, secondary liquidity is still thin and concentrated in a handful of names. Step outside those, and spreads widen and depth disappears the moment an order gets large. An institution cannot build or unwind a meaningful position without moving the price against itself. Access has been solved, but the liquidity problem is not. A tokenized stock that no one can exit at size is a demonstration, not a mature asset class.

This is the part of tokenization that does not make good marketing. Minting a token that references a share price is only the first step. Making that token tradable at institutional size, with tight spreads, real depth and clean settlement, is slow, unglamorous infrastructure work. It is also what will determine whether tokenized equities develop from an access product into a functioning market. The venues that win the tokenized-equity race will not be the ones with the longest list of tickers. They will be the ones where a large order actually fills near its quoted price, again and again, at any hour.

At Bitget, we treated tokenized equities as a liquidity and settlement problem first and a listing problem second. Trading activity in our rToken products grew eighteenfold in the weeks after launch, while independent analysis by CryptoRank found the lowest slippage for large tokenized-equity trades on our venue. The lesson is that distribution can bring users into a market, but execution quality determines whether they stay.

A unified settlement layer is the quiet foundation the whole category needs. A tokenized stock is only as useful as the account it lives in. If holding it, trading it, and borrowing against it happen in three disconnected places, the efficiency tokenization promised leaks away in transfers and idle margin. Bringing spot, derivatives, and collateral into one settlement pool is what lets a fixed amount of capital work more efficiently, and that is one of the most important advantages tokenization can deliver.

The liquidity question becomes even more important as trading itself becomes more automated. AI-driven systems can operate continuously, but continuous execution only works if the underlying market has dependable depth. A market that is technically open 24 hours but becomes prohibitively expensive to trade outside peak liquidity windows is not truly always-on. As software takes a larger role in allocating capital, liquidity and capital efficiency will matter as much as availability.

Tokenized stocks are around 15 percent of a real-world-asset market that is itself still small. I expect tokenized real-world assets to reach close to 10 percent of global capital markets within five years: trillions of dollars of equities, funds, and commodities trading with increasingly continuous access. That future will not be built by whoever lists the most stocks. It will be built by whoever can let people, and increasingly machines, trade them at size. Access was the demonstration. Liquidity is the market.