Tokenization has spent years being pitched as finance’s next great plumbing upgrade. According to GSR CEO Xin Song, the pipes work fine. The problem is that not enough people are turning on the tap.
Speaking on a podcast in March 2026, Song said demand for tokenized private credit and other illiquid assets has not caught up with supply. Wrapping a security in a token is the easy part. Finding a buyer for it is not.
Plenty of product, not enough shoppers
Song framed the issue around the scale of the opportunity. He described the tokenization of the roughly $300 trillion securities market as technically straightforward.
That is the structural gap Song pointed to. Issuers can digitize assets quickly. Meaningful buyer interest, especially for assets that were hard to trade before they went onchain, has lagged behind.
The numbers around the sector help illustrate the mismatch. Estimates put the total value of tokenized real-world assets somewhere between $39 billion and $60 billion.
Yet a large share of those assets barely move. Many tokenized real-world assets record zero trades in a given week.
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Private credit, one of the segments Song singled out, shows how fuzzy the picture still is. Estimates for the tokenized private credit market in 2026 range from $4 billion to $18.9 billion.
GSR is betting money on the demand side
GSR is not just diagnosing the problem from the sidelines. The firm is investing over $100 million in products designed to expand onchain finance and tokenization.
The centerpiece is Hare, an onchain vault business. Hare focuses on yield products built around stablecoins and tokenized gold, including PAXG and PAXGy.
The firm has also been assembling pieces of a broader tokenization stack. GSR has invested in Libeara and acquired firms including Autonomous and Architech.
Those moves are aimed at strengthening GSR’s end-to-end offering across advisory, issuance and liquidity services.
Where the demand is showing up
Not every corner of tokenization looks stalled. Tokenized equities reached a market value of about $4.87 billion to $5.89 billion in September 2026.
That segment has seen spikes in onchain trading volume. Meanwhile, conditions for tokenized fixed income products have been weaker.
Private credit and other illiquid assets are a harder sell. They were illiquid before tokenization for reasons that a blockchain does not automatically fix, including complexity, limited buyer pools and the work required to evaluate them.
What this means for the tokenization trade
For investors, Song’s comments land as a useful reality check on one of crypto’s most heavily promoted narratives. Large headline figures for tokenized assets can obscure how little of that value actually trades.
That matters most for the illiquid categories Song highlighted. Holders of tokenized private credit should not assume that being onchain means being liquid, because the weekly trading data suggests otherwise for many assets.
GSR’s $100 million push into Hare is one test of that thesis. If stablecoin and tokenized gold vaults draw sustained interest, it could show that pairing tokenized assets with yield is a workable path to demand.
The signals worth watching are fairly concrete. Look at whether trading activity in tokenized real-world assets picks up, whether private credit estimates start to converge, and whether the momentum in tokenized equities spreads into fixed income products.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Kaye Quema. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.