Tokenized assets with fewer than five holders now make up 13.6% of the market
The concentration of tokenized assets among few holders highlights liquidity risks and questions the true decentralization of the market.
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A slice of the tokenized-asset market has become thin in a way that matters for anyone underwriting it: assets with fewer than five holders now make up roughly 13.6% of total tokenized-asset market capitalization. The story is that concentration, not the price of any single token. When more than a tenth of the value that is supposedly “on-chain” is held by a handful of wallets, the market behaves less like a market and more like a registry of claims.
What the numbers say
Two independent reports — Crypto Briefing’s RWA desk and Coinfomania — put the figure at about 13.6% of the tokenized-asset market cap. In plain terms, a little over a tenth of the market is held so tightly that there is, in effect, no open secondary market for it. A token that only a handful of addresses can move does not trade like a freely liquid asset, whatever the headline ticker suggests.
Why concentration matters for RWA
The RWA pitch is that tokenization brings the transparency of on-chain ledgers to real-world assets, and that transparency is supposed to come with liquidity. A sub-five-holder tail undercuts the liquidity half of that promise in three ways:
- Liquidity risk. With a handful of holders, any single holder exiting can move the effective price with almost no buffer, and on a thin asset a buyer may not exist at all.
- False decentralization. “On-chain” is often used as a synonym for “decentralized.” A ledger where five addresses control a slice of the market is a record-keeping system, not a distributed market.
- Verification burden. When ownership is this concentrated, the on-chain balance tells you where the tokens sit but not who actually controls them, so the underlying custody and legal ownership matter more than the token’s price.
What to verify before treating a tokenized asset as liquid
- Check the holder count behind the top addresses, not just total supply — the 13.6% figure is specifically about the thin-holder tail, not the average token.
- Trace who the holders actually are. If the handful of addresses resolve to a single issuer, custodian, or fund, treat the asset as one issuer’s claim rather than a distributed market.
- Look at realized volume on real secondary venues instead of the stated market cap, which for a closely held token can be a paper number.
Sources and editorial check time
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Crypto Briefing RWA: https://cryptobriefing.com/tokenized-assets-fewer-than-five-holders/
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Coinfomania RWA: https://coinfomania.com/tokenized-assets-now-represent-13-6-of-market-cap/
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Editorial source check time: 2026-11-07T19:51:49.168Z
This information is educational and is not financial, legal, or tax advice.