Tokenized U.S. stocks are delivering on two of crypto's long-promised benefits — round-the-clock trading and the ability to buy a fraction of a share — yet they remain markedly less liquid and more volatile than the conventional equities they track, according to a new study from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The findings appear in the IMF's latest Global Financial Stability Report — the fund's flagship assessment of risks to the global financial system — in a chapter titled "Scaling Tokenization: New efficiencies and new vulnerabilities." Researchers examined the five most actively traded tokenized U.S. equities — including Tesla (TSLA), Nvidia (NVDA) and Alphabet (GOOG) — as well as benchmarks such as the Nasdaq 100 Index, across both centralized and decentralized venues. The IMF published the chapter and highlighted the work in a post on X.

Tokenization — representing ownership rights in traditional assets as digital tokens on a blockchain — has been promoted as a way to cut settlement times and operating costs. The report weighs those promised efficiencies against emerging vulnerabilities in markets where liquidity, legal rules and settlement systems have not yet caught up.

The study found that more than half of trading in tokenized U.S. stocks took place outside regular U.S. market hours, while about 80% of trades were for less than one full share. For the IMF, those figures are evidence that investors value 24/7 access and lower entry points — not just the technology behind a tokenized stock.

Off-Hours Trading as a Price Signal

The market's extended hours also appear to carry information. Overnight moves in tokenized shares provided a useful signal for the underlying stocks: once U.S. markets opened, more than 85% of the overnight movement in tokenized shares was reflected in their traditional counterparts within five minutes the IMF said.

"Moving assets onchain is only the first step," said Bitget CEO Gracy Chen. "The bigger question is how that capital can work once it is there."

A Small Slice of a $160 Trillion Market

While the use case is real, the IMF's message is that the market remains nascent. The tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market has grown rapidly, reaching an estimated $65 billion as of July 31, with tokenized equities accounting for roughly $2.3 billion of that total. By comparison, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), the trade group for the U.S. securities industry, put global equity market capitalization at just under $160 trillion in 2025.

That gap frames the report's central tension: the risks the fund flags are contained precisely because tokenized markets are small, yet the cost and time savings tokenization promises depend on the market becoming far larger.

Development continues despite the modest scale. Bullish (BLSH), a Gibraltar-based crypto company and CoinDesk's parent, introduced tokenized equity trading in August. Earlier this month, OKX and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which owns and operates the New York Stock Exchange, filed plans for a venue that would offer round-the-clock trading in tokenized U.S. shares.

They are not alone. Crypto exchanges Coinbase Global (COIN), Kraken and Binance also offer tokenized stock trading, as does Robinhood Markets (HOOD).

Fragmented Plumbing, Amplified Risks

According to the IMF, tokenized stocks were about 1.5 times as volatile as equivalent shares on traditional venues, and significantly less liquid.

The problem, the report suggests, is not simply that blockchain markets are small. Delivering tokenization's promised savings in cost and time requires enough issuers, investors, trading venues and settlement assets operating on compatible systems. Today's market is split across private platforms, public blockchains, custodians and settlement tools that often do not work together.

If those frictions are resolved, tokenization could replace some of the manual work firms currently perform to reconcile records, automate tasks such as dividend payments and speed up collateral transfers, the IMF said. It warned, however, that automated margin calls and liquidations, collateral moving between platforms and 24-hour trading could make a market shock harder to contain.

For now, those risks remain small because tokenized markets themselves remain small, the IMF said. The report argues, however, that legal rules on ownership, safeguards for liquidity, links between systems and settlement arrangements need to be developed before the market grows much larger — a set of conditions that effectively amounts to a roadmap for the exchanges and trading venues now building tokenized equity services.

Source: CoinDesk