Tokenized assets with fewer than five holders now make up 13.6% of the market

Tokenization was supposed to open up finance to everyone. A growing slice of it is instead being held by almost no one.

Assets with fewer than five holders now account for 13.6% of the tokenized asset market, approximately $7 billion in value. A year ago, that share was 6.4%.

A market of very few owners

The figures cover tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), excluding stablecoins. Think of RWAs as traditional financial products, such as Treasury funds or credit instruments, recorded on a blockchain instead of a conventional ledger.

That non-stablecoin market is estimated at somewhere between about $46 billion and about $60 billion as of mid-to-late 2026. The range is wide, but the concentration story holds at either end.

Just 62 assets represent roughly 88% of total tokenized RWA value. Narrow it further, and five products make up roughly half of the entire market.

Tokenized Treasury and credit funds dominate the top of the table. Together, they represent nearly half of the market.

Big balances, tiny cap tables

Some of the largest products have remarkably small ownership bases. Circle’s USYC is valued at approximately $2.96 billion, yet only 44 addresses hold it.

BlackRock’s BUIDL is also held within a narrow ownership base. Both examples point to a market that is institutional in character, not retail.

The extremes go further. Multiple products valued at over $100 million are held by a single address.

Trading activity tells a similar story. Of assets valued above $100,000 (roughly $32.9 billion in total), 56% showed zero weekly on-chain transfers.

Why the holder count matters

Holder counts are not just a vanity metric. They indicate whether an asset has a functioning secondary market, meaning whether you can actually sell it to someone else.

An asset with four holders and no weekly transfers has, for practical purposes, no visible trading. Its price on-chain may be accurate, but its liquidity is largely theoretical.

That does not mean these products are broken. Many institutional tokens are designed for a narrow set of qualified buyers, often with transfer restrictions built in.

In that context, the blockchain is mainly working as a record-keeping system. Institutions use it to track ownership and settle positions, not to trade with strangers.

The growth story has a footnote

Headline RWA numbers have been climbing, and the sector is frequently cited as one of crypto’s most promising bridges to traditional finance. The concentration data adds an important caveat to that narrative.

A rising total market cap can mask how value is distributed. If a growing share sits in assets with fewer than five holders, top-line growth says little about broad adoption.

The jump from 6.4% to 13.6% suggests new value is increasingly arriving through custodial or institutional wallets. It is not obviously arriving through a wider base of individual participants.

For anyone tracking the sector, holder distribution and transfer activity may be more revealing than market cap alone. A billion-dollar product with 44 holders and a billion-dollar product with thousands of holders are very different animals.

What this means for investors and the sector

For investors, the first implication is liquidity risk. Assets with tiny holder bases and no regular transfers may be hard to exit quickly, especially during periods of stress.

The second implication concerns how the market is measured. Rankings and dashboards built around total value can overstate how decentralized or widely used the sector really is.

For issuers, the data poses a quieter challenge. Products like USYC and BUIDL have proven that large institutions will put serious money on-chain, but they have not yet proven that a broad secondary market will follow.

Watch whether the share held by assets with fewer than five holders keeps rising, and whether the 56% figure for zero-transfer assets starts to shrink.