Tokenised assets have passed $30 billion worldwide. Nigeria is still writing the rules.

Tokenisation means recording ownership of a real-world asset, such as a government bond, a bar of gold or a building, as a digital token on a blockchain, a shared database that many computers keep in step. The token can then be bought, sold or used as security for a loan at any hour, in small amounts, without the paperwork of a traditional transfer. These are known as real-world assets, or RWAs, to separate them from cryptocurrencies like bitcoin that are not backed by anything outside the network.

How big has the market grown?

Estimates differ with definitions. An industry analysis published in August put the value of tokenised real-world assets at roughly $31 billion to $38 billion in 2026, not counting stablecoins.[1] On stricter, like-for-like definitions, it said, the figure is closer to $31 billion to $33.5 billion, up from about $11.8 billion in mid-2025.[1] In February, a crypto bank’s research team, using data from the tracker RWA.xyz, put the total at $24.7 billion.[2]

The growth is fast. But the world holds roughly $450 trillion of real estate, bonds, commodities and private credit, and less than $30 billion of it sits on a blockchain.[1] That is less than one hundredth of one per cent (derived).

What is actually being tokenised?

Mostly the safest thing there is. About $15 billion of the total is tokenised US Treasuries, short-term loans to the US government.[1] In February, Treasuries were 42% of the market, about $10.38 billion.[2] According to RWA.xyz data, they passed $10 billion in late February and reached $13.4 billion by early April.[1] The best-known product, BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, held about $2.5 billion in May.[1]

Investors buy these tokens because they pay interest, quoted in February at a modest 3.5% to 5% a year,[2] while staying usable inside crypto markets as security for loans or as a place to park cash between trades. In other words, the first big use of tokenisation has been to give crypto traders a safer place for idle dollars.

Gold is the second story. Tokenised commodities passed $6.1 billion in February, and gold made up 73% of them.[2] Gold itself traded at $5,080 an ounce at the time, up 75% over the previous year.[2]

February figures use RWA.xyz data as reported by a bank research team; 2026 estimates come from an August analysis drawing on several trackers. Definitions differ, so the columns are not strictly comparable. Sources 1 and 2.

Why do the numbers disagree so much?

Look at private credit, which is lending by funds rather than banks. One count put tokenised private credit at $2.8 billion in February.[2] Another put it at about $12 billion later in the year.[1] Part of that gap is growth: private credit was described as the fastest-growing segment.[2] But a more than fourfold rise in a few months (derived) also reflects different choices about what counts, such as whether a loan merely recorded on a blockchain is included, and whether value is measured by the tokens or by the loans behind them.

One tracker cited in the August analysis reported $37.89 billion of distributed asset value against $365.15 billion of off-chain collateral.[1] The gap between those two numbers is the gap between assets that can actually be traded as tokens and assets that are only represented on a blockchain.

What do the big firms forecast?

Forecasts are large. Boston Consulting Group’s base case is $16 trillion of tokenised real-world assets by 2030, and Deloitte projects that tokenised private real-estate funds could reach $1 trillion by 2035.[1] BCG’s figure is several hundred times today’s market (derived). Forecasts at that distance are scenarios, not measurements.

Where does Nigeria stand?

Nigeria’s legal base exists. The Investments and Securities Act 2025 recognises virtual assets and gives the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) oversight of digital asset operators and exchanges.[3] The SEC has proposed rules for tokenisation platforms, including a minimum capital requirement of ₦500 million, and in August it proposed registration fees of ₦30 million for several categories of digital asset operators.[3]

What is missing is the finished rulebook. On 19 October, at the National Capital Market Conference in Abuja, Senator Osita Izunaso, who chairs the Senate committee on capital markets, urged the SEC to move faster. “Do we have an enabling law guiding the issue of token development in Nigeria?” he asked, warning that Nigerian businesses were going abroad to explore tokenisation while local rules remained incomplete.[3]

The SEC’s Director-General, Emomotimi Agama, said earlier in October that the commission wants digital platforms “to enter the market through clear pathways”.[3] At the same conference, the SEC unveiled a ten-year plan to grow Nigeria’s capital market from about ₦250 trillion to ₦750 trillion by 2036.[3] The senator noted that more than five million companies are registered in Nigeria, but only about 151 are listed on the Nigerian Exchange.[3]

Why it matters here

That last figure is where tokenisation could matter most for Nigeria. Much Nigerian wealth sits in assets that are hard to buy into in small amounts: land, buildings, private companies. A well-regulated token could, in principle, let a teacher in Ibadan own ₦50,000 of a rental building, or let a mid-sized company raise money without the cost of a full stock-market listing.

The same features carry risk. A token is only as good as the legal right behind it. If a court will not recognise that the holder owns a share of the building, the token is just a digital receipt. Investor protection and legal enforceability are exactly the issues Nigeria’s rules will need to settle.[3]