From Tokenized Oil to Treasuries: CFOs Map the Real-World Asset Boom

Blockchains don’t take bank holidays. It is a core promise of blockchain finance that has persisted for years despite 24/7 crypto trading not finding much traction compared to traditional financial venues and platforms.

But as oil futures began moving rapidly this weekend due to the conflict involving Iran in the Middle East, a curious thing happened: Trading activity didn’t wait for traditional markets to reopen. Investors instead migrated to blockchain-based platforms offering tokenized oil exposure and other synthetic commodities. These markets run continuously rather than closing on Friday afternoon and reopening Monday morning.

While U.S. residents were unable to legally access the offshore platform hosting the perpetual oil futures trading spree, domestic agencies like U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are increasingly focused on using regulatory clarity to unlock the tokenized finance sector.

The Market Structure Subcommittee of the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee, which advises the SEC on its decision making, for example recommended that the agency move forward on a tokenized-securities policy during a vote Thursday (March 12).

“The potential investor benefits associated with the tokenization of equity securities are sufficient that the SEC should reform its existing regulations in a manner that enables public companies and market participants to tokenize equity securities, so long as such reforms do not compromise fundamental investor protections,” the committee wrote in its recommendation.

For finance chiefs and treasury leaders evaluating blockchain infrastructure, the gap between promise and scale matters. The question isn’t simply whether real-world assets (RWAs) will migrate on chain. It’s which assets are gaining traction today, how their volumes compare to traditional markets, and what signals CFOs should watch as regulatory frameworks and institutional adoption evolve.

See also: Tokenization’s Institutional Pitch Hits a Liquidity Wall

Treasuries, Oil, Other Assets Moving On-Chain

Traditional financial instruments like treasuries, private credit, commodities and even money market funds are gradually appearing as instruments on public blockchains.

Their proponents make them out to be programmable financial instruments that settle instantly, trade globally, and integrate directly with digital capital markets. Taken together across its product verticals, the RWA sector has grown to roughly tens of billions of dollars in on-chain assets across all categories.

That number sounds impressive until it’s compared with the scale of traditional capital markets. Tokenized Treasury products, for example, collectively represent only a hair over $11 billion dollars in assets. And they are one of the RWA space’s most popular assets. By contrast, the traditional U.S. Treasury market, the real-world one, exceeds $25 trillion.

As that mismatch would imply, liquidity remains a major bottleneck. Many tokenized assets have low trading activity and long holding periods, limiting secondary markets. Despite the oil trading hype, the broader story of bringing traditional financial assets onto blockchain infrastructure is far more nuanced than one weekend’s surge can shed light on.

The real question for finance teams is whether blockchain rails can deliver meaningful advantages over existing financial plumbing, and how.

One answer appears to be for crypto firms to gain access to that existing financial plumbing themselves. Kraken Financial, the banking arm of the Kraken crypto exchange, was approved for Federal Reserve payment system access on March 4, and just a few days later the Kraken parent company Payward launched a tokenization-focused partnership with Nasdaq on March 9.

A technical clarification issued jointly by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. confirming that tokenized securities receive the same capital treatment as traditional securities if they grant the same legal rights has in essence given compliant RWA initiatives a green light.

At the start of the year, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), part of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), even announced that it is developing a platform for the trading and on-chain settlement of tokenized securities, for which it will seek regulatory approvals.

See also: The New FinTech Scorecard Starts With a Bank Charter

Long Push to Bring Capital Markets On-Chain

Early crypto markets largely consisted of native digital assets such as bitcoin and ethereum. But as the ecosystem matured, investors began searching for ways to connect blockchain liquidity to real-world yield. That search gave rise to the RWA sector, where token issuers mirror traditional financial products on chain. The goal was not to replace existing markets overnight but to create parallel rails that eventually integrate with them.

PYMNTS explored the tokenization topic over this past summer in an interview with Brett McLain, head of payments and blockchain at cryptocurrency exchange Kraken.

“The tokenization of real-world assets [has] long been a holy grail for crypto … making those real-world assets more accessible globally to consumers,” McLain said. “We want to see that grow into other things like real estate and other tangible assets.”

But the very nature of the space means that integration with existing financial systems remains incomplete. While blockchain infrastructure offers new capabilities, most financial institutions still rely on traditional custody, settlement and compliance systems.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins”  noted that most middle-market firms have not even considered using digital assets, though adoption of stablecoins is further along than that of cryptocurrencies.