Overview
- The IMF’s October 2026 report measured tokenized real-world assets at about $65 billion and found tokenized repurchase agreements trade roughly $300–$350 billion daily.
- Tokenized equities show about 1.5 times the realized volatility of traditional stocks and sit in thinner, fragmented liquidity pools that harm price discovery.
- More than half of tokenized equity trades occur outside regular market hours and roughly 80% are for fractions of a token, which widens retail access but alters intraday risk patterns.
- The fund warned that instant or near-instant settlement and tighter tokenized plumbing can remove time buffers and speed up fire sales, liquidity withdrawal, and contagion between markets.
- To reduce those dangers the IMF called for technology-neutral regulation, clearer legal rights for token holders, stronger interoperability across platforms, and widely accepted settlement assets before tokenization scales.