Developed nations are treating tokenization as a backend upgrade. Emerging markets are treating it as a survival mechanism. This divergence will see regions like Latin America and Africa overtake the US and Europe as the primary drivers of Real World Asset (RWA) adoption by 2026, according to Colin Butler, Global Head of Institutional Capital at Polygon.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Butler outlined a shift in capital velocity. While US institutions wrestle with regulatory ambiguity and legacy banking inertia, emerging economies are leapfrogging directly to on-chain settlements.
Necessity Breeds Liquidity
The catalyst is not technology, but macroeconomics. In the US, tokenized Treasuries offer marginal efficiency gains for asset managers. In Argentina or Nigeria, they offer a lifeline against hyperinflation.
The demand for stable, dollar-denominated assets in these regions is not speculative. It is existential.
Legacy financial rails in the Global South are often fragmented or prohibitively expensive. This friction creates an immediate product-market fit for tokenized instruments that does not exist in the over-banked West. Butler argues that while the technology is being built in developed hubs, the volume and user adoption will coalesce where the pain points are sharpest.
The RWA Market Context
The sector is already pricing in this utility. Tokenized US Treasuries alone have surged to a market cap of over $2.4 billion, led by BlackRock’s BUIDL and Franklin Templeton’s FOBXX. Protocols catering to this demand, such as Ondo Finance ($ONDO), have seen sustained interest, trading at $0.72 as the market eyes yield-bearing stablecoin alternatives.
Conversely, developed markets face a “cold start” problem. Established banks must cannibalize profitable legacy fee structures to adopt tokenization. Emerging markets, lacking entrenched banking monopolies of the same scale, face lower barriers to entry. The forecast suggests that by 2026, the regulatory arbitrage will favor jurisdictions that view crypto as infrastructure rather than a speculative asset class.
