RWA · STABLECOIN YIELD · TOKENIZATION
Quarterly Data Brief · Q1 2026

The Five Most Important
RWA Numbers

Five data points that define the tokenized real-world asset market in Q1 2026, with sources, context, and what each one signals about what comes next.

Julie James
Founder, Women in Crypto Global · Editor, Tokenized Report ·
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7 pages · PDF · Published May 2026

What the numbers actually say.

Every quarter, a wave of "RWA is the future" content floods LinkedIn and crypto Twitter. Most of it recycles the same few statistics and projects them forward into trillion-dollar futures. Most of it is, at best, premature.

This brief is the opposite of that. Five numbers, drawn from primary sources, with the context required to understand what each one actually means. No projections to 2034. Just what the data says about where the market is right now and where the momentum is moving.

"The numbers don't lie, but the projections always do.
Watch the data, not the dreams."

The five numbers.

$19.32B
Number 01 The size of the global tokenized RWA market at end of Q1 2026, excluding stablecoins. Up 256.7% from $5.42B at the start of 2025.
$13.4B
Number 02 Tokenized U.S. Treasury market capitalization by early April 2026. Up from $9.6B at year-end 2025, with BlackRock's BUIDL alone crossing $2.4B.
$524.8B
Number 03 Total RWA perpetuals trading volume in Q1 2026, exceeding the $313B recorded across all of 2025. A signal of accelerating institutional and sophisticated trader involvement.
289%
Number 04 Year-over-year growth in tokenized commodities, reaching $5.5B in Q1 2026. Tokenized gold's correlation with traditional gold markets crossed 0.70, an inflection point.
15-9
Number 05 The Senate Banking Committee vote advancing the CLARITY Act on May 14, 2026. Could unlock significantly more institutional flow in H2 if passed.

Source methodology.

All figures pulled from primary sources: CoinGecko RWA Report 2026, RWA.xyz, Chainalysis, The Block, Grayscale Research, InvestAx Q1 2026 market report, and individual issuer disclosures from BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Ondo Finance, and others. Where sources differ, the brief notes the methodology variance.

Market capitalization figures exclude stablecoins unless otherwise noted, because including them creates an apples-to-oranges comparison ($300B+ stablecoin market versus $19-30B tokenized RWA market). The five numbers above are the most widely-cited figures across multiple independent sources.

This is a recurring brief.

The next quarterly Numbers brief will publish after Q2 2026 data is finalized in July, with updated figures, new sources, and revised interpretation. The RWA market is moving fast enough that quarterly cadence is the right pace for serious tracking. Subscribe to Tokenized Report to get each issue when it publishes.

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Tokenized Report publishes Sunday mornings. Three stories, one chart, one tactic. Built for people who don't have time for crypto Twitter.