Gold now accounts for nearly the entire tokenized commodity market, according to a16z Crypto. The firm said tokenized commodities total about $5.1 billion, while tokenized gold alone sits near $5 billion. Silver and other commodity products add only $57.6 million combined. That leaves gold with about 98% of the category.
a16z Crypto said oil, farm products, energy, and compute tokens remain small. Their presence in the market still looks limited. Gold, by contrast, has pulled almost all of the value into one asset class.
The report also links gold’s appeal to crypto culture. Bitcoin has long carried the label “digital gold,” and that connection now extends to tokenized gold products. Tether’s XAUT and Paxos’s PAXG both turn vault-held gold into tokens that users can keep in crypto wallets.
These products sit inside a broader tokenized asset market that a16z calls RWAs. The firm said this market has passed $30 billion and has hovered around $34 billion, excluding stablecoins.
a16z Crypto said U.S. Treasury debt has driven most of the recent growth. The firm noted that investors can hold a yield-bearing asset in a faster digital form. Bonds now stand as the largest tokenized asset class at $15.2 billion.
The report said tokenized Treasurys also help crypto investors put idle stablecoins to work. At the same time, they can gain access to traditional money-market yields. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and other asset managers have moved quickly to meet that demand.
The market has grown fast. In mid-2024, its value stood below $3 billion. The report tied much of the later expansion to the GENIUS Act, which gave clearer stablecoin rules in the United States.
a16z Crypto said not every tokenized category has grown at the same pace. Asset-backed credit reached $1 billion in 185 days after its first on-chain activity. Specialty finance followed and passed $1 billion in under two years.
Venture capital needed more than seven years to reach that level. Active strategies took almost as long. Government debt and commodities moved faster and reached $1 billion in about two to three years.
The report also said on-chain use still trails market size. Bonds make up the largest category, yet only about 5% of that supply, or around $800 million, sits inside DeFi protocols. Gold and other precious metals also see low DeFi use, since most tokenized gold stays on-chain rather than serving as programmable collateral.
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a16z added that some assets move freely across on-chain apps, while others act mainly as records. It said much of today’s tokenization looks closer to digitization. The report also noted sharp differences in chain share, with Ethereum holding $15.7 billion of tokenized assets, followed by BNB Chain, Solana, Stellar, Liquid Network, XRP Ledger, ZKsync Era, and Arbitrum.
Large forecasts still point much higher. McKinsey sees the tokenized market reaching $2 trillion to $4 trillion by 2030. Ark Invest expects $11 trillion. BCG and Ripple place it at $9.4 trillion by 2030 and $18.9 trillion by 2033. Standard Chartered projects more than $30 trillion by 2034.
Tokenized gold now dominates the commodity tokenization market, while tokenized Treasurys are driving the fastest growth in RWAs. Even so, DeFi use remains uneven across asset classes, showing that tokenization is still expanding more as digitization than full on-chain utility.