Pantera: $321B Tokenization Market Mostly Wrappers

Pantera Capital’s State of Tokenization Q1 2026 report analyzed 542 live tokenized assets across 11 categories using a Tokenization Progress Index (TPI) that scores issuance, transferability and composability on a five-point scale. The composite TPI average was 2.04, with 77.6% of assets functioning as wrapped representations, 11.1% classified as hybrid and 2.7% as native on-chain instruments.

Issuance scored lowest on the index at 1.82 out of 5. The report found 91.1% of assets rely on gated minting processes and custodian-mediated exits, and only 13 products offer autonomous mint-and-burn capabilities. New tokenized asset launches rose 115% in 2025, but most launches replicated existing off-chain structures rather than enabling continuous settlement, lower transfer costs or composability with decentralized finance protocols.

Pantera tracked about $320.6 billion in tokenized value, up roughly 60% from $200.6 billion in 2024. Stablecoins accounted for $293 billion, or 91.6% of tracked value, and posted the highest average TPI at 2.67. The report noted stablecoins were the only category combining large economic scale with measurable on-chain utility.

Outside stablecoins, private credit showed the highest DeFi penetration, with 21.4% of its value active on-chain. Actively managed investment strategies had 19.6% on-chain. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries exceeded $15 billion through products offered by BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Fidelity, but those products continued to use off-chain ledger structures rather than fully native on-chain models.

Excluding stablecoins, roughly half of scored assets were issued on the top five platforms, including Securitize, Maple Finance and Ondo Finance. Public layer-2 chains such as Optimism and Base outperformed permissioned networks on the TPI; Canton averaged 1.75. Overall, 12% of scored assets met the report’s threshold for meaningful DeFi composability.

The report included a direct quote: “The industry has successfully proven that assets can be represented on-chain, but it has not yet proven that on-chain representation fundamentally changes how those assets function.” The document described the sector as in a “newspaper-on-a-website” phase, where on-chain representation has not unlocked programmable features.

The report stated the next phase of tokenization will be judged by utility metrics such as settlement speed, transfer costs, trading activity and the amount of capital actively deployed in DeFi, and urged issuers to develop fully composable, native on-chain instruments.