6 Brutal Truths Pantera Capital Exposed About Tokenization’s $321 Billion Reality

Pantera Capital reported that the $321 billion tokenization market still averages 2.04 out of 5 on its on-chain maturity index, with 77.6% of 542 scored assets functioning as digital wrappers around traditional financial infrastructure.

The asset manager described the sector as stuck in a “newspaper-on-a-website” phase, where placing assets on a blockchain has not unlocked programmable features. New tokenized asset launches climbed 115% in 2025, yet most replicated legacy structures rather than enabling continuous settlement or composability.

Wrappers Dominate as Issuance Stays Gated

Pantera scored 542 live tokenized assets across 11 categories using its Tokenization Progress Index (TPI), which rates issuance, transferability, and composability on a five-point scale.

The composite average reached 2.04, with 11.1% qualifying as hybrid and only 2.7% achieving native status.

Source: Pantera Capital, State of Tokenization Q1 2026

Issuance scored worst at 1.82 out of 5. The firm said 91.1% of assets still rely on gated minting and custodian-mediated exits, while only 13 products achieved autonomous mint-and-burn functions.

Tracked value grew roughly 60% to $320.6 billion from $200.6 billion in 2024. Pantera called the trend the market “getting wider, not deeper,” with new issuance arriving faster than infrastructure depth.

Stablecoins Lead Scale, Private Credit Leads DeFi

Stablecoins accounted for $293 billion, or 91.6% of total tracked value, and posted an average TPI of 2.67. According to Pantera, stablecoins remain the only category combining real economic scale with measurable on-chain utility.

Private credit emerged as the standout non-stablecoin category for DeFi penetration, with 21.4% of value already active on-chain, ahead of actively-managed strategies at 19.6%.

Tokenized U.S. Treasuries reached above $15 billion through products from BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Fidelity Investments, yet still depend on off-chain ledger structures.

Tokenized US Treasuries. Source: RWA.xyz

Excluding stablecoins, the top five platforms, including Securitize, Maple Finance, and Ondo Finance, hold roughly half of all scored assets.

Public chains such as Optimism and Base outscored permissioned networks like Canton, which averaged 1.75. Only 12% of scored assets reached the threshold for meaningful DeFi composability.

“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,” Pantera Capital said in the report.

Tokenization Maturity by Asset Class. Source: Pantera Capital

What Comes Next

Pantera argued the next phase will be judged by utility metrics rather than assets under management figures, including settlement speed, transfer costs, trading activity, and capital actively deployed in DeFi.

The issuers moving beyond wrappers toward composable, on-chain native instruments could define the sector’s credibility through 2026.

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