The crypto market continues to decline today, with total market capitalization down 3.17% in the past month due to prolonged selling pressure. However, there is one sector going against the trend: real-world assets (RWA) tokenized.
The value of assets distributed in this sector continues to grow steadily, reaching new highs despite the overall market facing difficulties.
The Bitcoin sell-off continues, while the RWA sector is almost unaffected.
According to data from RWA.xyz, this sector is holding a total distributed asset value of up to 19.06 billion USD. This is an increase of 4.59% compared to last month.
At the same time, the total value of represented assets has reached 414.6 billion USD, mainly thanks to Canton Network managing 395.2 billion USD worth of assets from large financial institutions.
The number of investors holding this asset has also increased by 7.23% to 583,821 people. Stablecoins remain the leading group, accounting for a total value of 299.17 billion USD with 212.54 million holders. Compared to the same period, this figure has increased by 4.12%.
Kevin Rusher, founder of RAAC – an ecosystem for lending and borrowing RWA assets, shared that the majority of the crypto market's attention is still focused on Bitcoin prices, a type of asset that continues to decline. He believes that recent developments could keep selling pressure ongoing.
"As usual, most attention in the crypto market remains focused on Bitcoin prices, a type of asset that is gradually declining towards the end of 2025 like being glued to a sled... Yesterday, Strategy announced it would stop buying BTC and transfer over 700 million USD to cash, indicating that selling pressure may continue. The inflow into Bitcoin this year has also dropped sharply compared to last year, only 27.2 billion USD compared to 41.6 billion USD in 2024," Rusher commented.
Tokenized gold has emerged as the main growth driver.
Despite the overall weak picture, Rusher emphasizes that this wave of sell-off has not occurred in the tokenized RWA sector. He points out that this sector is still largely overlooked by the crypto market, although it is recording the highest returns this year.
This growth is partly due to the strong global demand for gold. The precious metal continues to set new historical highs, while tokenized gold also benefits significantly.
"In fact, tokenized gold has increased 227% from 1 billion USD to over 3.27 billion USD just this year, and the RWA commodity sector is one of the top bright spots for development this year. At the beginning of 2025, there were only 4 tokenized gold products, but by the end of the year, this sector expanded to 15 products, not only for gold but also for oil, wheat, platinum, soybeans, and many other assets," the director emphasized.
Moreover, Shehram Khattak – Legal Director of Trust Wallet, also stated that tokenized gold could become a major competitor to Bitcoin.
"We are witnessing a period where the narrative about real-world assets, such as tokenized assets, is becoming increasingly evident. Once gold is tokenized correctly, it will be very important, as Bitcoin is currently widely used as a store of value. If so, tokenized gold will become a formidable competitor to Bitcoin," he remarked.
Meanwhile, according to Rusher, the expansion of the RWA sector comes from the strong demand from large financial institutions as well as the increasing participation of retail investors. He noted that many retail investors are choosing to hold stable assets on blockchain rather than completely withdrawing from the market when volatility increases.
"A volatile year like the last has truly forged the RWA sector to become robust, turning into fertile ground for growth. This is a very positive signal for the development of the entire crypto market, as RWA will create a strong foundation that prevents capital from leaving crypto even in difficult times. RWA is certainly the future of crypto and needs more attention," he added.
The tokenization market could reach 100 billion USD by 2026.
Looking ahead, Jesse Knutson – Head of Operations at Bitfinex Securities, predicts that the entire tokenization market could reach at least 100 billion USD by the end of 2026.
I predict that tokenized fixed-income products will continue to dominate in the short term, while tokenized stocks gradually take a larger share of the total crypto assets.
Knutson added that the continued tokenization of stocks will attract more retail investors, helping to expand and deepen the investor base for tokenized assets.
"Tokenization can help provide legitimate access to investment opportunities such as micro-bonds, litigation finance products, or Bitcoin hashrate contracts – assets that traditional markets do not offer. We expect this trend to continue into 2026, with the emergence of many alternative assets, innovative fixed-income products based on Bitcoin mining, and crypto ETFs," he shared with BeInCrypto.
Earlier, Plume CEO – Chris Yin also predicted that this sector would grow 10–20 times in both value and user numbers by 2026, even with the most cautious scenarios. Therefore, as the RWA sector continues to expand, its performance in 2026 will certainly be a noteworthy trend.
