Grayscale’s Sebastian Pulido says tokenized assets must start earning their keep

Grayscale's head of onchain asset management expects the industry to stop counting tokenized assets and start judging how they are used by 2030 Tokenized real-world assets have had a big year. Grayscale’s Sebastian Pulido thinks the scoreboard is about to change anyway. In a Q&A with Pendle, Pulido, Grayscale’s Head of Onchain Asset Management, argued that by 2030 the industry will care less about how many assets get tokenized and more about what those assets actually do once they are onchain. The growth story so far The numbers behind the current enthusiasm are real. Tokenized real-world assets, or RWAs, reached $39.3 billion onchain by late October 2026. That figure reflects more than an 80% increase since January. Much of the growth came from heavyweight issuers such as BlackRock and Apollo. For the uninitiated, an RWA token is a blockchain-based claim on something that exists offchain. Think Treasury bills, money-market fund shares, or private credit, wrapped in a format that can move like crypto. Pulido’s point is that the wrapper is not the gift. In his view, putting an asset on a blockchain does not make that asset better by itself. Those three areas are where Pulido exp...