Tokenized stocks are successfully delivering on two of the cryptocurrency industry’s longest-standing promises—round-the-clock market access and the capability to purchase fractional shares. However, a comprehensive new study released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reveals that these blockchain-based assets remain markedly less liquid and significantly more volatile than the conventional equities they mirror.
The findings form part of the IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report, which is titled Scaling Tokenization: New efficiencies and new vulnerabilities. In the report, researchers closely examine the five most actively traded tokenized U.S. equities. This evaluation includes high-profile corporate names such as electric vehicle pioneer Tesla, semiconductor giant Nvidia, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, alongside broader market measures like the Nasdaq 100 Index, tracking activity across a mix of both centralized and decentralized trading venues.
Examining Trading Habits and Overnight Discovery
According to the data gathered by the IMF, more than half of all trading activity involving these tokenized assets took place entirely outside of regular U.S. market hours. Furthermore, approximately 80% of all individual trades executed on these networks were for less than a single whole share. For the authors of the report, these distinct figures serve as clear empirical evidence that investors genuinely value continuous 24/7 access and lower financial entry barriers, rather than simply being attracted to the underlying blockchain technology powering a tokenized stock.
The study also uncovered significant insights regarding price discovery during overnight sessions. Researchers discovered that overnight price movements observed in tokenized stocks carried meaningful financial information that translated effectively to the underlying traditional shares. Once traditional U.S. stock markets officially opened for the day, more than 85% of the overnight price movement experienced by the tokenized shares was fully reflected in their conventional counterparts within a remarkably brief window of five minutes.
Industry leaders have been quick to weigh in on the implications of these developments. "Moving assets onchain is only the first step," noted Bitget CEO Gracy Chen, highlighting the evolving nature of the ecosystem. "The bigger question is how efficiently that capital can work once it is there."
Market Maturity and Rapid Ecosystem Growth
The core message delivered by the IMF is that while the practical use case for tokenization is entirely real and growing, the underlying market remains in a decidedly nascent stage of development. The report points out that the broader tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market has expanded at a rapid pace, with estimated total valuations reaching approximately $65 billion as of July 31. Within that expansive figure, tokenized equities accounted for roughly $2.3 billion. To put this into perspective, the global equity market capitalization for 2025 stood at just under $160 trillion, according to data provided by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), the prominent trade group representing the U.S. securities industry.
Despite the relative size disparity, the expansion of tokenization projects across the financial landscape continues unabated. Bullish, a Gibraltar-based digital asset company and the parent organization of CoinDesk, formally introduced tokenized equity trading capabilities in August. Meanwhile, earlier this month, major crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)—the corporate entity that owns and operates the prestigious New York Stock Exchange—filed formal plans to launch a dedicated trading venue offering round-the-clock trading capabilities for tokenized U.S. shares.
These institutions are far from alone in pursuing this strategy. Prominent cryptocurrency exchanges including Coinbase Global, Kraken, and Binance all currently offer various forms of tokenized stock trading services, a roster that also includes retail-focused brokerage giant Robinhood Markets.
Despite this widespread institutional and retail adoption, the empirical data compiled by the IMF indicates that tokenized stocks traded at roughly 1.5 times the volatility level of equivalent shares on traditional trading venues, while simultaneously exhibiting significantly lower levels of market liquidity.
Structural Bottlenecks and Future Regulatory Challenges
The fundamental hurdle facing the sector is not simply that blockchain-based markets are currently small in scale. For tokenization to truly deliver its heavily touted savings in operational costs and transaction times, the ecosystem requires a critical mass of issuers, investors, trading venues, and settlement assets operating seamlessly on compatible systems. At present, however, the digital asset market remains heavily fragmented, split across private platforms, public blockchains, various custodians, and divergent settlement tools that frequently fail to interoperate efficiently.
The IMF report acknowledges that tokenization possesses the genuine potential to eliminate some of the tedious manual labor financial firms currently undertake to reconcile disparate records. It could likewise automate routine administrative tasks such as the distribution of dividend payments and drastically accelerate the speed of collateral transfers. However, the international financial organization simultaneously issued a stark warning: automated margin calls and liquidations, rapid movements of collateral between distinct platforms, and uninterrupted 24-hour trading loops could collectively combine to make a sudden market shock significantly harder to contain.
At present, these systemic risks remain relatively contained simply because the tokenized markets themselves remain small, according to the IMF. Nevertheless, the report strongly argues that foundational legal rules governing asset ownership, robust safeguards for market liquidity, secure technical links between disparate systems, and modernized settlement arrangements must be fully developed and implemented before the market is allowed to scale to a much larger size.
