The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has found that investors are interested in tokenized stocks because of the ability to trade them 24 hours a day and buy small percentages of a share. However, a new IMF study found that tokenized stocks are more volatile and less liquid than regular shares.
The study looked at popular US stocks such as Tesla, Nvidia and Alphabet, as well as the Nasdaq 100 Index. It found that more than half of all trades took place outside regular US market hours, and approximately 80% of the trades were for less than one share.
These findings suggest that investors value the ability to trade at any time and invest small percentages of a share. Tokenized stocks use blockchain technology to represent shares or investor exposure to their prices. This allows some features of the stock market to be utililized on blockchain-based platforms.
Source: imf.org
The study also found that price changes in tokenized stocks during the night usually gave an indication of how the actual shares would move later. More than 85% of these price changes were seen in the corresponding traditional shares within five minutes of the US market opening.
However, tokenized stocks still face some challenges to their adoption. According to the IMF, they were about 1.5 times more volatile than regular shares, and also less liquid, which may make it difficult for investors to buy or sell them at a fair price.
The market is growing, but it is still very small compared with the global stock market. The IMF estimated that the market for tokenized real-world assets was worth about $65 billion as of July 31, 2026. Tokenized stocks made up around $2.3 billion of this total. In comparison, the global stock market was worth just under $160 trillion in 2025.
Several companies are entering this market. Crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken and Binance already offer tokenized stock trading. Bullish started offering tokenized equity trading in August. OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, have also filed plans for a platform that would allow investors to trade tokenized US shares around the clock.
The IMF said that tokenization could make financial markets faster and simpler, and reduce the need for paperwork, automate dividend payments and speed up the transfer of assets used as security for loans or other financial deals.
However, the IMF also warned that the ability to trade 24 hours a day and automatically sell assets during a market fall could make it more difficult to manage a financial crisis. The risks are still limited due to the size of the market, but the IMF said that clear rules on ownership, better links between platforms and proper safeguards are needed before tokenized stocks become more widely adopted.
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