"Tokenization" gets thrown around as if it's one thing. Treasuries, funds, private credit, and equities are all being tokenized, and they solve different problems, face different blockers, and are at completely different stages.

A tokenized T-bill and a tokenized stock have almost nothing in common besides living onchain. Different assets, different buyers, different friction, different maturity curves.

And tokenization itself is not the end state. It's the starting point. Moving capital to a new rail. What happens after — making it productive, composable, plugged into real markets — that's the actual game.

Tokenized Treasuries

Mostly US government debt. T-bills and money market funds, represented as tokens onchain.

Names to know: BUIDL, USYC, USDY, BENJI.

This was the first category to scale outside of stablecoins, crossing $10B in TVL in February 2026. The issuance problem is largely solved. The composability layer still needs to catch up.

Tokenized Funds

Traditional investment funds — credit funds, CLO strategies, carry trade vehicles — restructured so they're not just onchain but composable inside DeFi.

Names to know: JAAA, USCC, ACRED.

This is the category where composability is not a future goal, it's the actual product. Without DeFi integration these are just funds with extra steps.

What blocks it is complexity. Making a fund composable inside DeFi isn't a distribution problem, it's a product design problem.

Tokenized Private Credit

Business loans and credit facilities represented as tokens, giving investors onchain access to private lending returns.

Names to know: Maple Finance, Figure, Centrifuge.

By total value, private credit is the largest tokenized RWA category at roughly $12B+. But it also has the hardest ceiling: private credit is illiquid by design, and putting it onchain doesn't remove that mismatch.

Tokenized Equities

US stocks and ETFs available as tokens, tradeable onchain 24/7.

Names to know: Ondo Global Markets, Backed Finance, Securitize, Robinhood.

This category grew nearly 3,000% in 2025. Still small in absolute terms, but the trajectory is steep. It feels like the category with the most raw potential and the least clarity.

What blocks it is the issuance layer still being early: regulatory uncertainty, the buyer question, and the synthetic vs backed debate all remain open.

Everything Else

Commodities, real estate, and corporate bonds are all getting the tokenization treatment too. Most have no clear answer for what comes next. Putting a deed or a carbon offset onchain doesn't automatically make it productive capital.

Why This All Matters

Getting any of these categories from tokenized to actually useful isn't just a composability problem. It requires new infrastructure that legacy finance never needed: settlement layers, institutional custody, compliance wrappers, and onchain pricing for assets that never had real-time markets.

And that leads somewhere uncomfortable. Because what's being built to get them there is increasingly written to institutional spec: permissioned pools, KYC gates, walled gardens. The builders are still mostly crypto-native. But the blueprint is starting to look like the thing tokenization was supposed to replace.

The promise of tokenization is the original promise of DeFi: composable, permissionless, trustless. Whether that survives contact with institutional capital is the question none of these categories can avoid.