Real World Assets, or RWA for short, are physical and financial assets whose ownership or claim is recorded on a blockchain: government bonds, money market funds, corporate loans, gold, real estate. The term sounds like a clearly defined asset class, and that is exactly what it is not. We counted the category ourselves on October 23, 2026, and the two most striking findings come first: of the $70.32 billion held in the fifty largest RWA tokens, $26.03 billion sits in a single tokenised credit product from the United States. Another $23.32 billion are not tokenised assets at all, but tokens of the networks that administer such assets.
Anyone reading that the RWA market is worth $70 billion is reading a total made up of two entirely different things. This article takes that total apart, explains the technology behind it and sets out what German law makes of such a token. Because the German Electronic Securities Act treats a crypto security differently from what most people expect.
What Real World Assets are, and what tokenisation means technically
Tokenisation means that the right to an asset is recorded in an entry on a blockchain instead of in a certificate or a custody statement. The to...
English (US)