Tokenised real-world assets (RWAs) — excluding stablecoins — surpassed $25 billion in on-chain value in March 2026, nearly quadrupling from roughly $6.4 billion the previous year. Yet a large share of those assets remains illiquid, instead of being deployed toward what may prove to be blockchain’s most important institutional use case: live collateral that can move — and importantly earn — within institutional workflows.
The real institutional opportunity, therefore, lies in the gap between asset tokenisation and actual deployment.
The Operational Tax on Traditional Collateral
For most institutions, collateral is anything but mobile. That’s because the legacy collateral management system that underpins global finance was built for a slower era. The result is an operational tax that shows up daily in excess collateral buffers, unnecessary funding costs and lost interest earnings on capital that should be working harder.
In periods of market stress — and during overnight and weekend windows — that cost compounds. Institutions are left over-positioned in advance and under-flexible when it matters most.
A 2025 global survey of 203 institutions by Nasdaq and the ValueExchange puts that tax into perspective.
Roughly 35% of respondents said they currently pre-position more than half of their collateral overnight, ready for morning margin calls that may never materialise. Among Tier 1 firms surveyed, the aggregate non-remunerated collateral position — in other words, collateral earning no return — ran to approximately $36.8 billion. Nasdaq also found that firms maintain, on average, a 7% excess collateral buffer as a structural safeguard, while 70% reported settlement matching and delivery failures on a daily basis.
None of these are problems of everyday operational inefficiency. They are the hallmark of an underlying system structurally incapable of moving capital quickly enough when required.
The Difference Between Issuance and Utility
Tokenisation headlines tend to focus on issuance volume and on-chain representation — a framing that undersells the opportunity. Institutions care less whether an asset exists on a blockchain than whether it can be monitored and priced in real time and deployed whenever needed.
Once those conditions are met, collateral stops being an idle buffer and starts having real utility.
The implications of effectively mobilising tokenised collateral would be far-reaching. Excess collateral buffers would likely shrink considerably because assets would no longer need to be parked so far in advance. Collateral substitution would become faster and cheaper. Overnight funding costs would fall as previously idle capital became deployable. Responsiveness would improve for exchanges, clearing houses and treasury functions operating across increasingly continuous markets.
The Nasdaq/ValueExchange survey gives a sense of what the financial upside could look like in practice.
Respondents projected a 13.4% reduction in settlement failures, a 12% cut in operating expenses and a 7.8% reduction in overnight funding costs. For a single Tier 1 firm, mobilising tokenised collateral could generate roughly $346 million in additional annual interest earnings.
The same survey found that 52% of firms expect to be actively managing live tokenised collateral by end-2026, suggesting the window for early-mover advantage is narrowing.
Putting Assets On-Chain is the Easy Part
One of the biggest remaining barriers to widespread collateral tokenisation is legal rather than technical.
Many tokenised structures today still represent claims on assets held in traditional custody systems. The token moves on-chain, but the underlying asset does not necessarily move with immediate legal finality. A structure in which on-chain transfer itself carries direct legal effect is a much more powerful instrument, but one that still requires legal and market-infrastructure reform in many jurisdictions.
Progress, however, is being made.
The Basel Committee’s Group 1a classification in place since 2022, for example, provides a path for tokenised traditional assets to receive equivalent prudential treatment where they meet the relevant criteria. The CFTC’s December 2025 guidance took a technology-neutral approach to tokenised collateral in US derivatives markets, but made clear that eligibility still hinges on legal enforceability, custody arrangements and a range of operational controls. Alongside it, the CFTC confirmed it would not take enforcement action against firms accepting digital assets as collateral, directly addressing regulatory uncertainty that had rendered the practice commercially unworkable for futures commission merchants.
The regulatory framework is no longer saying “no”. It is increasingly saying “show that it works.”
What’s Already Being Built
And it is already beginning to work at institutional scale.
In October 2023, BlackRock tokenised shares in a money market fund and transferred them to Barclays as collateral for an OTC derivatives trade using J.P. Morgan’s Tokenised Collateral Network. More broadly, J.P. Morgan says its Kinexys Digital Assets platform had processed more than $1.5tn in notional value by November 2024 through its intraday repo and collateral services — evidence that the infrastructure for blockchain-based collateral mobility is already being built at scale.
Elsewhere, DTCC has piloted tokenisation of DTCC-custodied US Treasury securities through existing Article 8 security-entitlement structures on the Canton Network, modernising the transfer layer within established legal rails.
Meanwhile, NexBridge — the company behind USTBL, the Bitfinex Securities-issued product described as the first regulated public offering of Bitcoin-native tokenised U.S. Treasury exposure — has made clear that collateralisation forms part of the product’s intended function on the Liquid Network, while signalling ambitions to support more complex institutional use cases over time.
Bridging the Gap
The legacy collateral system was built for a financial world defined by fixed hours, manual intervention and delayed settlement. In a market environment that is increasingly always-on, that architecture now imposes a recurring tax in the form of idle capital, excess buffers and lost earnings on assets that should be mobile and productive.
Tokenisation offers a credible remedy — and potentially one of blockchain’s most consequential institutional use cases. Yet despite more than $25 billion in tokenised assets now on-chain, too much of that value still sits idle.
The gap between tokenisation as issuance and tokenisation as usable collateral is closing.
The remaining bottlenecks are legal and operational rather than technical. Transfer finality, custody enforceability and liquidation certainty in default still require legal reform, regulatory alignment and institutional-grade market design. But that work is now underway, and momentum is building.
What is already clear is where things are headed. Institutions investing now in the infrastructure, legal architecture and operational capability needed to make collateral genuinely mobile are positioning themselves to capture gains that could amount to hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. While the current operational tax on idle collateral is big, it’s nowhere near as big as the opportunity to eliminate it.
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