T1 Weekly Market Report
Week of May 4, 2026
The Number That Changes Everything
The tokenized RWA market hit $19.32 billion by the end of Q1 2026, up 256.7% from $5.42 billion at the start of 2025. That's not a trend anymore. That's a structural shift.
But the number that actually matters this week isn't the market cap. It's this one: nearly 400,000 distinct wallet addresses now hold tokenized RWA assets — and data shows a spike in wallets created specifically to hold tokenized assets throughout late 2025 and into 2026. For this cohort of users, RWAs are the reason to come on-chain.
The sequence of crypto adoption just reversed. For years, people came for Bitcoin, found DeFi, and eventually discovered RWAs. Now wallets are being created specifically to hold T-bills. The entry point is yield, not speculation.
This Week In Numbers
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| RWA Market Cap | $19.3B |
| Tokenized Treasuries Total | $15.2B |
| BUIDL (BlackRock) | $2.8B |
| USDY (Ondo Finance) | $2.14B |
| BENJI (Franklin Templeton) | $2.05B |
| Tokenized Gold Q1 Volume | $90.7B |
| RWA Perps Q1 Volume | $524.8B |
| Tokenized Stocks Market Cap | ~$487M |
| Tokenized ETFs Market Cap | ~$300M |
Yield Watch
Current rates on tokenized Treasury products:
- USDY (Ondo Finance) — ~4.8% APY — yield-bearing, no staking or lockup required
- BUIDL (BlackRock) — $2.8B TVL — institutional benchmark, daily accruals
- BENJI (Franklin Templeton) — $2.05B — registered mutual fund, daily liquidity
- USTB (Superstate) — 3.81% APY — accredited investors, $814M
- OUSG (Ondo Finance) — $682M — short-term government bond fund
For context: the average US savings account currently pays around 0.5%. The math is not subtle.
Sector Spotlight: Gold Goes Institutional
The most striking data point from Q1 2026 isn't Treasuries. It's gold.
Tokenized gold spot trading volume surpassed $90.7 billion in Q1 2026 alone — already exceeding the entire 2025 full-year volume of $84.6 billion. XAUT and PAXG together account for nearly 90% of the commodities category's increase, with market caps of $2.52B and $2.32B respectively.
What's more significant than the volume is the behavior behind it. Beginning in Q2 2025, tokenized gold volumes broke out of their historically weak correlation with traditional gold markets, spiking sharply above a 0.70 correlation with GLD — and have remained there through Q1 2026.
In plain English: on-chain gold is finally starting to trade like real gold. Price discovery is maturing. Liquidity is deepening. The gap between on-chain and TradFi markets is closing.
Tokenized Equities: The Fastest Growing Category
Tokenized stocks scaled from just a few million dollars in mid-2025 to nearly $500 million in market value by Q1 2026. Major tech-linked assets including Tesla, Nvidia, and Alphabet are leading this segment. Tokenized stocks recorded $15.1 billion in Q1 2026 spot trading volume — topping the entire second half of 2025.
Tokenized ETFs reached $300 million, with broad-based growth and no single product dominating, suggesting the category is still forming.
This is the category to watch. Tokenized equities are the bridge between crypto-native users and traditional investors. Someone who understands stocks but doesn't understand DeFi can immediately understand owning a tokenized share of Nvidia. That's a fundamentally different user than the one who came for yield.
The Liquidity Question
Not everything in the RWA report is bullish. Paris Blockchain Week surfaced a debate worth taking seriously.
Ondo Finance's EMEA sales director said plainly at the summit:
"I think there's still this idea that tokenizing something illiquid will somehow magically make it a liquid asset, which is just not true."
The data supports this nuance. Tokenized real estate grew from ~$35M to $296M over the past year. Private equity rose from ~$60M to $223M. Strong percentage growth — but both categories remain comparatively small.
Tokenization creates the infrastructure for liquidity. It does not create liquidity itself. That still requires participants, market makers, and secondary trading venues. This is the gap Terminal One exists to close.
The International Angle
An investor in Latin America or Africa looking to access US T-bills would traditionally have to convert local currency to USD, find a licensed offshore brokerage, wire funds with significant fees, and manually manage a trading strategy.
Tokenization changes all of that. T-bill tokens are accessible in exchange for USDC — no cross-border payment rails, no wire fees, no minimums.
This is not a niche use case. In countries with double-digit inflation, access to 4.8% APY in dollars is not a financial product. It's financial infrastructure. The addressable market for tokenized T-bills is not American savers earning 0.5% at a bank. It's billions of people globally who have never had access to stable, yield-bearing assets in their lives.
One Thing To Watch This Week
RWA perpetual futures.
RWA perps volume hit $524.8 billion in Q1 2026 — compared to $313 billion for all of 2025. Hyperliquid's HIP-3 contract captured 28.6% of Q1 volume, with open interest across RWA perps reaching $6.68 billion.
The emergence of leveraged exposure to tokenized assets signals that the RWA market is maturing beyond simple buy-and-hold. Sophisticated traders are now building positions, hedging, and speculating on RWA price movements. That's what a real market looks like.
The Bottom Line
The RWA market is no longer a thesis. It's a functioning financial system with $19 billion in assets, record trading volumes, institutional issuers, and a growing base of users who came on-chain specifically for these assets — not for speculation.
The remaining question isn't whether tokenized assets win. McKinsey projects the RWA tokenization market could reach $2 trillion by 2030. The question is where participants access them, how they discover new assets, and who builds the interface that makes it seamless.
That's what we're building.
T1 Weekly Market Report publishes every Monday at 9am EST. Data sourced from CoinGecko RWA Report 2026, RWA.xyz, and Chainalysis. Not financial advice.
Trade every asset in this report at t1.pro
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