Pantera Capital: 81% of tokenized Treasury value is held, not traded

Tokenized US Treasuries have crossed the $12B mark. But if you were hoping for a vibrant secondary market where these digital bonds change hands like baseball cards, you’d be disappointed. According to Pantera Capital’s latest State of Tokenization report, 81% of tokenized Treasury value just sits there, held rather than actively traded.

Pantera’s Q1 2026 report surveyed 593 tokenized assets across 11 categories. The total market value hit roughly $321B, up 60% from $201B in 2024. Of the 542 scored assets, 77.6% are classified as “wrappers,” meaning they’re essentially blockchain receipts for assets that still live off-chain. Only 2.7% of the assets qualified as truly native tokens. The rest exist somewhere in between, carrying a blockchain label but relying on traditional custodians, gated minting processes, and intermediary-dependent redemptions.

Pantera created something called the Tokenization Progress Index, or TPI, to measure how far along each asset is in its journey toward full on-chain functionality. The average score across all scored assets landed at 2.04 out of 5. For issuance and redemption features specifically, that number dropped to 1.82, making it the weakest dimension. Most products still depend on custodian-mediated exits rather than autonomous mint-and-burn mechanisms.

Stablecoins run the show

Stablecoins remain the undisputed heavyweight champion of the tokenized asset world, accounting for approximately $293B of the total $321B market. That’s about 91.6% of the entire space. They also scored the highest average TPI at 2.67.

Tokenized US Treasuries came in as the second-largest category at around $12B. Institutional products from BlackRock and Franklin Templeton drive much of this volume. Pantera’s data suggests these products largely function as wrappers with restricted secondary market activity, reinforcing the 81% held-not-traded finding.

168 new products, same old structure

The pipeline isn’t slowing down. Pantera found that 168 new tokenized assets launched in 2025, representing a 115% increase from the prior year. Most of these newcomers arrived in the wrapper tier, suggesting that issuers are prioritizing speed to market over deep on-chain integration.

Private credit showed DeFi penetration rates ranging from 21.4% to 64.3%, depending on the specific product. That’s a meaningfully higher engagement with decentralized protocols than Treasuries or most other asset classes have managed.