Grayscale's head of onchain asset management expects the industry to stop counting tokenized assets and start judging how they are used by 2030
Tokenized real-world assets have had a big year. Grayscale’s Sebastian Pulido thinks the scoreboard is about to change anyway.
In a Q&A with Pendle, Pulido, Grayscale’s Head of Onchain Asset Management, argued that by 2030 the industry will care less about how many assets get tokenized and more about what those assets actually do once they are onchain.
The growth story so far
The numbers behind the current enthusiasm are real. Tokenized real-world assets, or RWAs, reached $39.3 billion onchain by late October 2026.
That figure reflects more than an 80% increase since January. Much of the growth came from heavyweight issuers such as BlackRock and Apollo.
For the uninitiated, an RWA token is a blockchain-based claim on something that exists offchain. Think Treasury bills, money-market fund shares, or private credit, wrapped in a format that can move like crypto.
Pulido’s point is that the wrapper is not the gift. In his view, putting an asset on a blockchain does not make that asset better by itself.
Those three areas are where Pulido expects the industry’s attention to move. He sees pricing reliability, liquidity, and acceptance as collateral as the real tests for tokenized products.
From counting assets to using them
Pulido’s forecast is that by 2030, the conversation will center on how effectively tokenized assets are put to work. He ties that shift to improvements in collateral and trading mechanisms over the coming years.
Some of that usefulness is already visible. Tokenized money-market funds are currently accepted as margin across several exchanges.
Margin is the collateral traders post to back leveraged positions. When a tokenized fund share qualifies, a trader can keep earning yield on that position while also using it to support trades elsewhere.
Exchanges and lenders need to trust the pricing, the redemption path, and the operational plumbing. Without that trust, a tokenized asset is a museum piece: impressive to look at, not much use in a trade.
Grayscale’s own commentary has also highlighted stablecoins as a key piece of this puzzle. Stablecoins can enable continuous trading and settlement of tokenized assets in traditional markets, which matters when the underlying securities still keep traditional business hours.
The longer horizon
Pulido’s long-term vision goes further than collateral tweaks. He imagines a future where assets are primarily issued onchain from the start, rather than tokenized after the fact.
In that world, credit would be assessed through transparent data instead of periodic reports. Rather than waiting for a quarterly filing to understand a borrower’s health, market participants could, in theory, examine the data as it updates.
Who is making the call
Pulido brings an unusually mixed resume to the argument. Grayscale appointed him as Head of Onchain Asset Management on July 21, 2026.
Before that, he led institutional strategy at Aave Labs. He was integral in launching Aave Horizon, a lending platform built for tokenized assets.
He also held positions at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.
What this means
For investors, the takeaway is that headline growth figures may become a less useful signal over time. A $39.3 billion onchain market is notable, but Pulido’s framework suggests the more telling metrics will be how much of that value is actually deployed as collateral, traded with deep liquidity, or priced reliably.
The presence of BlackRock and Apollo among the main growth drivers matters here too. Large traditional issuers may give institutions more confidence in tokenized offerings, and confidence is precisely the ingredient Pulido’s collateral thesis depends on.
What to watch: whether more exchanges and lenders accept tokenized assets beyond money-market funds as margin, how stablecoin settlement develops alongside traditional markets, and whether any meaningful volume of new assets begins life natively onchain.
