Pantera Says Tokenization Is Still in Early Wrapper Phase

• Pantera says the tokenization market has grown to $321 billion, but remains structurally immature.
• Its Tokenization Progress Index found most tokenized assets still operate as wrappers around traditional financial products.

Pantera says tokenization is growing fast, but not yet becoming the financial redesign many in crypto expected.

Most tokenized assets are still wrappers

The crypto asset manager analyzed 542 tokenized assets across 11 asset classes using its Tokenization Progress Index, a framework that scores issuance, transferability and composability from 1 to 5.

The average score was just 2.04. That matters. According to Pantera, roughly 77.6% of tracked assets sit in the “wrapper” tier, meaning they mostly reproduce traditional financial products onchain without fundamentally changing how those products work. Another 11.1% qualify as hybrid, while only 2.7% reach the native tier.

Pantera described the current phase as similar to putting a newspaper on a website. The content is digital, but the format has not really changed yet.

That is the key criticism. Tokenization has brought assets such as Treasurys, funds and credit products onto blockchains. But many still rely on gated issuance, controlled redemptions and familiar offchain processes. Pantera found that 91.1% of scored assets still used restricted issuance and redemption models.

Native finance remains rare

The report argues that most issuers are still copying traditional market structure rather than designing around continuous settlement, composability and onchain governance. Only 13 assets achieved autonomous or near-symmetric mint-and-burn functionality.

DeFi integration is also limited. Just 10.6% of assets reached Pantera’s threshold for meaningful composability, where tokenized assets can be used naturally across lending, collateral, liquidity and other onchain systems.

Stablecoins remain the exception. They are the only tokenized asset category operating at meaningful economic scale while also showing real onchain utility.

That leaves the broader $321 billion tokenization market in an awkward position. Growth is real. Institutional interest is real. But the market is still mostly building digital versions of old instruments, not yet the native financial infrastructure that blockchains were supposed to enable.