IMF finds $2.3 billion of tokenized stocks already price the overnight session

SIFMA counted just under $160 trillion of global equity value for 2025 ^[7]. Against that, the tokenized stock pool is roughly one dollar in every 70,000 ^[19]. Within tokenization it is a small part too, about 3.5% of the real-world asset market the IMF sized ^[18].

That size is the context for the study's other results. The tokens were about 1.5 times as volatile as the same shares on conventional venues, and significantly less liquid ^[8]. Even so, their overnight moves mostly carried into the open, and less than 15% of the move was still missing from the listed shares five minutes after the bell ^[17]. We think both results can hold at once. A thin market can point the right way overnight and still be a hard place to trade in size. The sample was the five most actively traded tokenized U.S. equities, plus measures such as the Nasdaq 100, across centralized and decentralized venues ^[4].

In our view the harder limit is legal. Ownership rules come first on the IMF's list of things to build before the market grows much larger, ahead of liquidity safeguards, links between systems and settlement arrangements ^[11]. The fund credits tokenization with three savings: less manual reconciliation, automated dividends and faster collateral transfers ^[20]. Each of them assumes a settled answer to what a token holder actually owns. "Moving assets onchain is only the first step," Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said. "The bigger question is how efficiently that capital can work once it is there." ^[21]

The counter-case is that liquidity binds first. In the IMF's account, the cost and time savings arrive only once enough issuers, investors, trading venues and settlement assets sit on compatible systems ^[16]. For now the market is fragmented, with private platforms, public blockchains, custodians and settlement tools frequently unable to connect to one another ^[12]. An ownership rule on its own would not connect those systems.

Liquidity could gather on one or two large venues, which is what the OKX and ICE filing is betting on ^[14]. Or it could stay spread across the venues already live. Bullish, which owns CoinDesk, the outlet that reported the study, started tokenized equity trading in August ^[13], and Coinbase, Kraken, Binance and Robinhood also offer it ^[15]. A shock could also come before either. The IMF warned that automated margin calls and liquidations, collateral moving between platforms and round-the-clock trading could make one harder to contain ^[10]. It calls the risks small for now because the market is small ^[11].

We would be wrong if the volatility gap with the listed shares narrows as bigger venues open while ownership rules stay unwritten. That would show it was liquidity, and not law, that kept the market at its current size.