The stock market that never sleeps: What tokenization is really changing

Binance Research recently published a new market commentary, “Stock Market That Never Sleeps,” looking at the rapid growth of the tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market. The headline figure is striking: the market crossed US$10 billion in total value in 2026, up tenfold from under US$1 billion in early 2024. Trading averaged US$735 million a week across the year, and at one point in late 2025 it peaked near US$20 billion in a single week, showing the asset class can handle large, institutional-sized flows.

Yet even at US$10 billion, this is a tiny fraction of the market’s potential, less than 0.01% of the total value it could eventually represent. The research models a wide range of outcomes, from roughly US$203 billion at modest adoption to as much as US$6.78 trillion if uptake accelerates. Whatever the eventual figure, the direction of travel points to a market still in its earliest stages.

What I find most interesting is not the size of the market but who is using it and why. According to the commentary, around 80% of tokenized stock trading on Binance comes from users in emerging markets. This is not speculation. By trading tokenized shares directly with stablecoins, these users avoid an average 3.6% withdrawal fee and roughly US$40 in fixed international transfer costs per transaction. Those are real costs that have long made owning global shares impractical for anyone outside major financial centres.

The way people trade reinforces this. The research found that 93% of these trades were for less than a single share, with a median size of just US$18.81 against an average share price of around US$680. Buying in fractions at this scale describes a fundamentally different way of investing, one where exposure to expensive shares no longer means committing hundreds of dollars at a time.

There is also a telling point about pricing. One tokenized asset kept trading right through a weekend, over roughly 65 hours, while traditional markets were closed. By the time those markets reopened on Monday, the tokenized version had already arrived at almost exactly the same price the traditional market opened at. In other words, the around-the-clock market priced the asset accurately on its own, without waiting for the official market to reopen.

The broader takeaway from the research is that tokenized assets do not simply copy existing access. They reshape it. Round-the-clock trading, fractional ownership, and stablecoin settlement together describe a way of investing built to reach people the traditional system was never designed to serve.

Tokenization will not settle every question of regulation, custody, or investor protection overnight, and those conversations matter. But the data tells us something important: there is real, unmet demand for broader access to markets, and the technology to meet it is maturing quickly. DM

Author: Larry Cooke, Binance Africa

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