TL;DR:
- Pantera says the tokenization market has reached $321 billion after 60% growth, but remains structurally early.
- Its Tokenization Progress Index scored 542 assets and found average onchain maturity around 2 out of 5.
- The firm says 77.6% of assets remain wrappers, while true onchain finance requires programmable compliance, autonomous collateral management, real-time yield optimization and embedded governance instead of tokenized copies of existing offchain financial products and workflows alone today.
Pantera Capital is drawing a sharp line between tokenizing assets and building genuinely onchain finance. In a new assessment of the tokenization market, the firm says the sector has reached $321 billion after 60% growth, yet still sits in what it calls the “newspaper on a website” phase. The phrasing is deliberately uncomfortable: tokenization has proven distribution, not reinvention, because most assets are still digital wrappers around offchain products rather than financial instruments designed natively for programmable markets, autonomous settlement and composable collateral across blockchain environments at institutional scale.
Tokenization Growth Still Looks Structurally Early
Pantera’s Tokenization Progress Index scored 542 tokenized assets and found an average onchain maturity score of roughly 2 out of 5. The result suggests that the market’s headline size can exaggerate how much real transformation has happened underneath. A token can be issued onchain while still depending heavily on traditional custody, administration, compliance and redemption processes outside the network. In practical terms, the market is large but still shallow, because blockchain rails are being used to represent existing products more often than to redesign how ownership, yield, collateral and governance function.
The wrapper problem dominates the analysis. Pantera said 77.6% of assets in the scored universe remain wrappers, while stablecoins account for 91.6% of total tokenized market value. Stablecoins look comparatively more mature, with only 55% labeled as wrappers, but that also highlights how concentrated the sector remains in payment-like assets rather than broader programmable finance. Meanwhile, Pantera counted 168 new tokenized assets launched in 2025. That growth shows experimentation is accelerating, yet new supply does not automatically equal new financial architecture when most products still mirror offchain originals.
The next stage, in Pantera’s framing, requires instruments that cannot simply be copied from traditional finance. True onchain products would include programmable compliance, autonomous collateral management, real-time yield optimization, embedded governance and the ability to unbundle assets into specific risks and revenue streams. That is a more demanding standard than listing a fund token or bond representation on a blockchain. For now, the $321 billion market remains a transitional layer, proving institutions can distribute assets onchain, while leaving the deeper question open: when will tokenization stop digitizing the past and start producing finance that only blockchains can run for institutional markets over the next cycle ahead?
