Tokenized shares are successfully delivering two long-anticipated cryptocurrency advantages: continuous 24-hour trading and fractional share purchases. Simultaneously, they remain substantially less liquid and display higher volatility compared to their traditional equity counterparts, according to a recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The newest Global Financial Stability Report from the IMF, titled Scaling Tokenization: New efficiencies and new vulnerabilities, reviews the five most heavily traded tokenized equities in the United States—featuring companies like Alphabet (GOOG), Nvidia (NVDA), and Tesla (TSLA)—as well as benchmarks such as the Nasdaq 100 Index, spanning decentralized and centralized trading locations.
The IMF discovered that over fifty percent of trading activity occurred outside standard U.S. exchange hours. Approximately 80% of all transactions involved fractional shares totaling less than one unit. Authors of the report interpret these metrics as proof that market participants prioritize round-the-clock availability and accessible entry points over merely utilizing the underlying technology.
Furthermore, the analysis revealed that overnight price fluctuations in tokenized equities contained valuable market signals. When U.S. exchanges opened, over 85% of the overnight price shifts seen in tokenized equities were mirrored in standard shares within a five-minute window, the IMF reported.
“Moving assets onchain is only the first step,” remarked Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget. “The bigger question is how efficiently that capital can work once it is there.”
The core message from the IMF is that while the practical application is genuine, the market is still in its infancy. The organization noted that the market for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) has expanded rapidly, valuing it at approximately $65 billion by July 31. Tokenized shares represented about $2.3 billion of that aggregate sum. This is modest when measured against the global equity market capitalization of nearly $160 trillion recorded in 2025, according to data from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), the trade association representing the U.S. securities sector.
Even so, the tokenization movement continues to scale. Bullish (BLSH), a Gibraltar-headquartered digital asset platform and parent company of CoinDesk, rolled out tokenized stock trading in August. Earlier in the month, OKX alongside the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), parent company and operator of the New York Stock Exchange, submitted proposals for a marketplace providing continuous round-the-clock trading of tokenized U.S. equities.
They are joined by others. Major digital asset exchanges such as Binance, Kraken, and Coinbase Global (COIN) provide tokenized stock exchange services, alongside Robinhood Markets (HOOD).
The IMF estimated that tokenized equities exhibited roughly 1.5 times the volatility of corresponding traditional market shares while suffering from much lower liquidity.
The challenge extends beyond the modest scale of blockchain-based markets. To achieve the promised efficiencies in time and expense, tokenization requires sufficient participants across issuers, investors, trading venues, and settlement tools operating on interoperable frameworks. The current ecosystem remains fragmented across public blockchains, private networks, custodians, and clearing mechanisms that frequently lack integration.
According to the IMF, tokenization has the potential to eliminate manual reconciliation efforts for companies, streamline administrative processes like dividend distributions, and accelerate collateral mobility. At the same time, the institution cautioned that automated liquidation procedures, margin calls, cross-platform collateral flows, and continuous trading might exacerbate financial shocks and complicate containment efforts.
Because tokenized sectors remain small, associated systemic risks are currently limited, according to the IMF. However, the report cautions that robust legal definitions for ownership, liquidity protections, cross-system connectivity, and clearing protocols must be established before the market achieves widespread expansion.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/10/11/imf-finds-demand-for-tokenized-stocks-says-the-market-is-still-volatile-illiquid.
