ARK: Tokenised Assets Hit $39bn as Stock Tokens Jump

ARK Invest estimates that tokenised real-world assets grew by about 19% in the third quarter, to about $39bn, and that tokenised shares were the fastest-moving part of the market. The figures are in ARK’s DeFi Quarterly for Q3 2026, written by Lorenzo Valente and Raye Hadi and published this week, with data as of 30 September.

Real-world assets, or RWAs, are things such as government bonds, credit and shares that exist in traditional markets but are issued or traded as tokens on a blockchain. ARK says the market “more than doubl[ed] year-over-year from ~$17 billion”.

Three weeks on, the total has hardly moved. The rwa.xyz dashboard, read by TSN at about 17:50 BST on 22 October, showed distributed RWA value of $39.03bn, up 0.08% over 30 days. A week earlier, on 15 October, it showed $39.18bn.

Where ARK says the growth came from

ARK breaks the quarter down by asset type. By its estimates:

Tokenised stocks rose about 86% to about $3.2bn.
“Active strategies”, meaning tokens of managed funds, rose about 166% to about $4.0bn.
Tokenised US Treasuries were flat at about $15bn.
Tokenised credit grew about 25% to about $8bn, helped by launches such as a tokenised high-yield fund from Securitize and Neuberger Berman.

ARK credits the stock growth to Coinbase, Robinhood and Kraken’s parent, Payward, rolling out tokenised equities, and to the Securities and Exchange Commission having, in ARK’s words, “cleared their trading on permissioned DeFi venues”.

On those numbers, tokenised Treasuries are still the largest single block, at more than a third of the total. TSN’s own check of rwa.xyz put tokenised Treasuries at about $14.82bn on 6 October, in line with ARK’s figure. Tokenised stocks grew fastest but, at about $3.2bn, are still under a tenth of the total. Treasuries stood still, so most of the quarter’s increase came from stocks, managed funds and credit.

Trading grew faster than holdings

ARK’s bigger claim is about trading. It says spot volume in tokenised stocks on decentralised exchanges, which match trades through code rather than a company, “grew ~9x to ~$50 billion, or ~9% of all spot DEX volume, up from ~1% in the second quarter”.

The report gives a second multiple for the same figure. Its exchange section says “tokenized asset volume surged ~4.3x to ~$50 billion”. The two may count slightly different things; ARK does not reconcile them.

By ARK’s count, BNB Chain (about $16.5bn) and Robinhood Chain (about $13.7bn) led tokenised equity trading, ahead of Solana (about $6.9bn) and Base (about $1.7bn, after Coinbase’s tokenised stock launch on 24 August). The most-traded tokens tracked Nvidia (about $3.1bn) and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (about $2.5bn).

ARK attaches two warnings. Binance “ran an incentive program for some tokenized equities, which may have inflated volume on BNB Chain”. And Robinhood Chain, which ARK says generated about $65bn in exchange volume and about $51m in network revenue in its first quarter, is unlikely to repeat that. “A recent gas change should bring revenue down from these levels,” ARK writes.

Not all of these tokens carry shareholder rights. OKX’s xStocks listing, for example, carries no ownership or voting rights. TSN’s tokenised stocks guide sets out how redemption and venue rules differ.

Two sources, one data set

ARK’s RWA charts are drawn from rwa.xyz data, so the ARK report and the dashboard are not independent checks on each other. ARK also counts only assets that use a blockchain “as a means of distribution”, not those where it is used only for record-keeping. rwa.xyz also shows a much larger “represented” figure, $368.13bn on 22 October and up 3.10% over 30 days, which is not part of the $39bn distributed figure both use.

What the dashboard does add is the month since ARK’s cut-off. Distributed value has been flat, while the dashboard’s holder count rose 13.78% over 30 days to 5,289,930.