IMF: Tokenized stocks show real retail demand but stay volatile and illiquid
The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report finds genuine retail demand for tokenized stocks, but the $2.3 billion market is more volatile and less liquid than the shares it tracks.
IMF: Tokenized stocks show real retail demand but stay volatile and illiquid
Roughly half of all trading in tokenized U.S. stocks takes place while Wall Street is closed, and about 80% of the orders are for fractions of a share rather than whole ones, according to a study by the International Monetary Fund.
The figures come from Chapter 3 of the IMF’s October 2026 Global Financial Stability Report, a chapter titled “Scaling Tokenization: New efficiencies and new vulnerabilities.” The study examined the five most actively traded tokenized U.S. equities, including tokens tracking Tesla, Nvidia and Alphabet, across centralized and decentralized venues. Given the market’s early stage, the IMF said its findings “should be interpreted with caution” and that systemic risks remain limited for now.
The stability side is weaker: the IMF measured volatility in the tokens at about one and a half times that of the shares they track, and found liquidity thinner still. Price gaps between the tokens and conventional markets were widest on decentralized venues.
When U.S. markets reopened, traditional shares absorbed most of the overnight price moves their tokenized counterparts had made, the IMF found. Tokenized venues add trading activity around the clock, but genuine price formation still happens at the regular open.
The market itself remains small. Tokenized equities were worth about $2.3 billion as of July 31, 2026, part of a tokenized real-world asset market the IMF pegged at about $65 billion on the same date. The IMF said in a post on X that tokenized assets, while growing rapidly, remain tiny next to traditional capital markets’ $300 trillion in assets. The study also found the tokenized stock market is concentrated, with Ondo Finance and Backed Finance’s xStocks reportedly accounting for more than 70% of it.
On the policy side, the IMF recommends that regulators weigh trading halts suited to around-the-clock markets and keep a closer watch on how the tokenized and traditional structures interact. The report lands as the sector scales up: OKX and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the NYSE, filed plans in early October for a venue offering round-the-clock trading in tokenized U.S. shares, and the NYSE plans to reach crypto investors through Blockchain.com. Earlier efforts to bring equities onchain drew their own skepticism, including a Columbia professor’s criticism of the NYSE tokenization plan as vaporware.
Retail investors have already found their way to tokenized stocks through wallets such as MetaMask, which integrated more than 200 tokenized U.S. stocks via Ondo Finance in February. The IMF’s message is that demand is no longer the open question; volatility, liquidity and legal rules on ownership and settlement are.
