IMF Sizes Tokenized Market at $65B, Flags Scaling Risks in New Report

IMF Sizes a $65B Tokenized Market

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) put hard numbers on tokenized finance on Thursday, estimating outstanding tokenized real-world assets at about $65 billion as of July. The figure appears in Chapter 3 of the October Global Financial Stability Report, a chapter titled “Scaling Tokenization: New Efficiencies, New Vulnerabilities,” and it is a rounding error against the roughly $300 trillion in global capital-market assets. The fund names four constraints holding the market back: legal certainty, regulatory clarity, interoperability and the availability of safe settlement assets. The composition is telling. Tokenized credit accounts for $30.4 billion and money market funds for $17.5 billion, together about $48 billion of fixed-income exposure, while tokenized equities trail at roughly $2.3 billion. Tokenized stocks remain the smallest slice even though they draw the most retail attention. Settlement activity shows the same early-but-concentrated pattern: tokenized repurchase agreements averaged $300 billion to $350 billion in daily volume in the fund's latest 30-day measurement, beside roughly $13 trillion traded each day in the conventional US repo market. The IMF's warning is conditional rather than immediate. Systemic risk stays limited today because adoption is small, but as tokenized markets scale, tighter interconnectedness and leverage could amplify fire sales, liquidity runs and contagion inside traditional finance.

24/7 Demand Meets 1.5x Volatility

The evidence base is unusually specific. IMF researchers compared the five most liquid US tokenized equity products, issued by Ondo Finance and xStocks and tracking the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100, Tesla, Google and NVIDIA, across 11 venues and 365 trading days, a combined market cap of about $345 million. Demand for always-on access is measurable: more than half of all trades happened outside regular US market hours, and about 80% were for less than one full share, confirming that fractional ownership is pulling small investors in. On-chain prices also carry information. Overnight returns on tokenized stocks appeared in traditional prices within roughly 15 minutes of the conventional open, early evidence that these venues can act as a price signal while regulated markets are closed. The costs are equally concrete. Tokenized products ran about 1.5 times the realized volatility of the underlying shares, and decentralized exchanges, which lack the dedicated market makers that anchor order books on centralized venues, showed the weakest liquidity of any venue type studied. The chapter was presented at the Bank of Korea on Thursday, one of several IMF releases ahead of the IMF-World Bank annual meetings that open in Bangkok on October 12.

Stablecoin Settlement Named the Weak Link

Settlement is where the IMF sees the sharpest vulnerability. The fund argues that if tokenized securities are settled in private deposit tokens or stablecoins instead of central bank money, concentration and contagion risk piles onto an issuer that already carries credit and liquidity risk, since mass withdrawals can follow any loss of confidence. Its recommendations are specific: technology-neutral supervision that removes unnecessary barriers without weakening resilience, regulatory sandboxes, circuit breakers, liquidity buffers, and settlement in assets that are safe, sound and scalable. The timing matters. Just days before the chapter's release, a joint venture between OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the NYSE, notified the SEC that it plans a 24/7 tokenized stock venue under the agency's new Innovation Exemption, listing more than 60 stocks from NVIDIA and Tesla to SpaceX, with each token trading against USDC, USDG or USDT. Those are precisely the instruments the IMF flags. The report also lands weeks before South Korea launches its token-securities framework in February, a rollout that starts with institutions, opens to retail investors and eventually moves settlement on-chain using tools such as stablecoins. Several decentralized venues in the study run on automated market makers, a design the fund associates with elevated infrastructure and governance risk on permissionless networks.

From Warning to Policy Prescription

Thursday's chapter is the fund's fourth pass at tokenization in a year: it warned in November 2025 that automated trading and interconnected smart contracts could amplify flash crashes, cautioned in April that faster settlement could accelerate stress, and flagged fragmented platforms and weak regulatory coordination in July. The European Securities and Markets Authority raised a parallel concern last month about shocks spreading from crypto into traditional finance. What is new in October is the shift from diagnosis to prescription, and the IMF authors conclude that policy, not technology, will decide whether tokenization delivers market depth and trust. For Bitcoin (BTC) and the market it anchors, the practical question is settlement plumbing: the stablecoins that carry the on-chain economy sit at the center of the fund's risk case, and issuers that meet the safe-and-sound bar are likelier to win regulatory acceptance. Bitcoin price action played no role in the IMF dataset, but the settlement choices made in response to this report will shape how capital moves across the venues Bitcoin leads.