Wall Street is abuzz about ‘tokenized assets’—but most activity is limited to a nascent ‘wrapper’ phase, report finds

Pantera Capital founder and managing partner Dan Morehead onstage at a conference in 2023 (Credit: Jeenah Moon—Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Finance leaders from BlackRock’s Larry Fink to Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev have displayed enthusiasm for tokenization, a term for representing real-world assets as tokens on the blockchain. But despite the excitement, roughly 78% of tokenized assets remain only as “wrappers,” or receipts for assets that primarily operate off-chain, according to a new report from crypto asset manager Pantera. 

The report scored 542 tokenized assets on a scale from wrapper, where a token represents a claim on an offchain asset held by a custodian, to native, where issuance, redemption, and custody all happen fully onchain. The study found 77.6% of assets fell into the category of wrapper.