IMF study finds tokenized stocks volatile and illiquid as venues grow
Tokenized stocks deliver round-the-clock trading and fractional ownership, but they are about 1.5 times as volatile as the conventional shares they track and significantly less liquid, according to a new International Monetary Fund study. The fund's latest Global Financial Stability Report, Scaling Tokenization: New efficiencies and new vulnerabilities, examined the five most actively traded tokenized US equities, among them Tesla, Nvidia and Alphabet, as well as index measures including the Nasdaq 100, across centralised and decentralised venues.
More than half of trading took place outside regular US market hours and about 80% of trades were for less than one share, the IMF found, evidence it said that investors value 24/7 access and lower entry points rather than the technology alone. The study also found that overnight moves in tokenized stocks carried useful information for the underlying shares: once US markets opened, more than 85% of the overnight movement in tokenized shares was reflected in their traditional counterparts within five minutes. "Moving assets onchain is only the first step," said Gracy Chen, chief executive of the crypto exchange Bitget. "The bigger question is how efficiently that capital can work once it is there."
The IMF estimated the tokenized real-world asset market at about $65 billion as of 31 July, of which tokenized equities accounted for roughly $2.3 billion. Global equity market capitalisation stood at just under $160 trillion in 2025, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the trade group for the US securities industry. Venues are multiplying: Bullish, the Gibraltar-based crypto company and parent of CoinDesk, introduced tokenized equity trading in August, while OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, filed plans earlier this month for a venue offering round-the-clock trading in tokenized US shares. Coinbase Global, Kraken, Binance and Robinhood Markets also offer tokenized stock trading.
According to the IMF, the market's difficulties go beyond its size. Tokenization needs enough issuers, investors, trading venues and settlement assets on compatible systems to deliver its promised savings in cost and time, but today's market is split across private platforms, public blockchains, custodians and settlement tools that often do not work together. The fund said tokenization could replace some of the manual work firms do to reconcile records, automate tasks such as dividend payments and speed up collateral transfers, while warning that automated margin calls and liquidations, collateral moving between platforms and 24-hour trading could make a market shock harder to contain.
The IMF said those risks remain small because tokenized markets remain small, but its report argues that legal rules on ownership, safeguards for liquidity, links between systems and settlement arrangements need to be developed before the market grows much larger.
