RWA issuers prioritize capital formation over liquidity, according to Brickken survey

• A new Brickken survey finds most real-world asset issuers are using tokenization primarily to improve capital formation and fundraising efficiency, not to unlock secondary market liquidity.
• While major exchanges like CME, NYSE and Nasdaq push toward 24/7 trading for tokenized assets, many issuers remain in a validation phase focused on regulatory structures, issuance processes and compliant asset quality.
• Regulation is the main drag on tokenization efforts, even as activity expands beyond real estate into equities, IP and entertainment, with industry leaders emphasizing issuance infrastructure as the key bridge between traditional and decentralized finance.

A new fourth quarter 2025 survey from tokenization platform Brickken suggests that the majority of real-world asset (RWA) issuers are using tokenization to raise capital rather than to unlock secondary market liquidity, according to a report shared with CoinDesk.

Among respondents, 53.8% said capital formation and fundraising efficiency is their main reason for tokenizing, while 15.4% said the need for liquidity was their main incentive. Another 38.4% said liquidity was not needed, while 46.2% said they expect secondary market liquidity within six to 12 months.

“What we’re seeing is a shift away from tokenization as a buzzword and toward tokenization as a financial infrastructure layer,” Jordi Esturi, CMO at Brickken, told CoinDesk. “Issuers are using it to solve real problems: capital access, investor reach, and operational complexity.”

Brickken’s report comes as major U.S. stock exchanges announce plans to expand trading models for tokenized assets, including 24/7 markets. CME Group said they will offer around-the-clock trading for its crypto derivatives by May 29, while the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Nasdaq shared their plans to offer 24/7 tokenized stock trading.

Esturi said the exchanges’ plans have more to do with business model evolution than with an issuer demand disconnect. “It’s less about getting ahead of demand and more about exchanges evolving their business model,” he said. “Exchanges increase revenue by increasing trading volume, and extending trading hours is a natural lever.”

At the same time, many issuers are still in what he described as the phase of validation, during which they prove regulatory structures, test investor appetite and digitize issuance processes. “Liquidity is not yet their primary focus because they are building foundations,” he emphasized, adding that they view tokenization as “the upstream engine that feeds trading venues.”

The Brickken CMO also said that without compliant, structured, high-quality assets entering the market, secondary trading platforms have nothing meaningful to trade. “The true value creation happens at the issuance layer,” Esturi noted.

Optional liquidity versus mandatory

While 38.4% of surveyed issuers said liquidity was not required, Esturi pointed out the difference between “optional liquidity and mandatory liquidity,” noting that many private market issuers operate on long-term horizons. “Liquidity is inevitable, but it must scale in parallel with issuance volume and institutional adoption, not ahead of it.”

Ondo, which began with tokenized U.S. Treasuries and now has more than $2 billion in assets, is focused on stocks and ETFs specifically because of their “strong price discovery, deep liquidity and clear valuation,” Chief Strategy Officer Ian de Bode said in a recent interview with CoinDesk.

“You tokenize something either to make it easier to access or to use it as collateral,” de Bode said. “Stocks fit both, and they price like assets people actually understand, unlike a building in Manhattan. If TradFi moves to 24/7, that’s a godsend,” de Bode added. “It’s our biggest bottleneck.”

The survey shows that tokenization is already operational for many participants: 69.2% of respondents reported completing the tokenization process and being live, 23.1% are in progress, and 7.7% are still in the planning phase.

Regulations are still an issue

Regulation is a major concern among those surveyed: 53.8% of respondents said regulation slowed their operations, while 30.8% reported partial or contextual regulatory friction. In total, 84.6% experienced some level of regulatory drag. By comparison, 13% cited technology or development challenges as the hardest part of tokenization.

“Compliance isn’t something issuers are dealing with after launch; it’s something they’re taking into account and configuring from day one,” said Alvaro Garrido, founding partner at Legal Node. “We see an increasing demand for legal structures tailored to the specific project needs and underlying technology.”

The report also suggests tokenization is expanding beyond real estate. Real estate accounted for 10.7% of assets tokenized or planned for tokenization, compared with 28.6% for equity/shares and 17.9% for IP and entertainment-related assets. Respondents spanned sectors including technology platforms (31.6%), entertainment (15.8%), private credit (15.8%), renewable energy (5.3%), banking (5.3%), carbon assets (5.2%), aerospace (5.3%) and hospitality (5.2%).

“The real bridge between TradFi and DeFi is not ideological,” said Patrick Hennes, head of digital asset servicing at DZ PRIVATBANK. “It is issuance infrastructure that translates regulatory requirements, investor protection and asset servicing standards into programmable systems.”

• A purpose-built AI security agent detected vulnerabilities in 92% of 90 exploited DeFi contracts ($96.8 million in exploit value), compared with 34% and $7.5 million for a baseline GPT-5.1-based coding agent running on the same underlying model.
• The gap came from domain-specific security methodology layered on top of the model, not differences in core AI capability, according to the report.
• The findings come as prior research from Anthropic and OpenAI shows AI agents can execute end-to-end smart contract exploits at low cost, accelerating concerns that offensive AI capabilities are scaling faster than defensive adoption.

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