GSR CEO says tokenization has a buyer problem, not a tech problem

Tokenization has spent years being pitched as finance’s next great plumbing upgrade. According to GSR CEO Xin Song, the pipes work fine. The problem is that not enough people are turning on the tap. Speaking on a podcast in March 2026, Song said demand for tokenized private credit and other illiquid assets has not caught up with supply. Wrapping a security in a token is the easy part. Finding a buyer for it is not. Plenty of product, not enough shoppers Song framed the issue around the scale of the opportunity. He described the tokenization of the roughly $300 trillion securities market as technically straightforward. That is the structural gap Song pointed to. Issuers can digitize assets quickly. Meaningful buyer interest, especially for assets that were hard to trade before they went onchain, has lagged behind. The numbers around the sector help illustrate the mismatch. Estimates put the total value of tokenized real-world assets somewhere between $39 billion and $60 billion. Yet a large share of those assets barely move. Many tokenized real-world assets record zero trades in a given week. Private credit, one of the segments Song singled out, shows how fuzzy the picture still is....