We've published two pieces on tokenization in the past weeks: an overview of the four asset classes moving on-chain, and a detailed look at tokenized commodities. What we haven't covered yet: which blockchain is this actually happening on? And what does that concretely mean for the price of the underlying coins?

This is the question we've received most often after the first two posts. It's also the one where it's easiest to get the answer wrong, because the obvious response — "tokenization runs on Ethereum, so ETH pumps" — only half holds up in the mechanics. So let's go through this systematically: what the data shows today, how the picture has shifted over the past few years, and where the actual levers on coin prices sit.

Who's settling right now — as of May 2026

If you turn on the tokenized-asset market and sort by blockchain, the picture is clear:

Two readings:

• Ethereum is the undisputed market leader. Anyone launching a Treasury token, a tokenized fund, or putting a stock on-chain today picks Ethereum with high probability. BlackRock's BUIDL fund, Franklin Templeton's BENJI (though BENJI originated on Stellar), Ondo's Treasury products — all are Ethereum-centric. More than 60% of distributed RWA value sits on Ethereum.

• But the second tier is growing faster than the leader. Solana tripled its RWA volume in 2025. Arbitrum has become a real trading layer for RWAs through Robinhood's tokenized US stocks for European users. BNB Chain has become the second-largest network, driven by Ondo Global Markets and a growing stablecoin base.

These two movements aren't in contradiction. They say: Ethereum has the established position, but the field stays open.

Why Ethereum leads — and what supports that position

Anyone setting up a tokenized asset asks four questions: Where do I find liquidity? Where do I find the right compliance tools? Where do I find my target audience's wallets? And where do I find insurers, auditors, and lawyers who know the stack?

On all four questions, Ethereum is currently the most natural answer. Not because the tech is superior — Solana clearly leads on speed and fees — but because Ethereum is the only network with a complete institutional infrastructure around it. ERC-20 and ERC-1400 are mature standards for compliance-ready tokens. Securitize, Tokeny and similar issuer platforms have the most experience there. The major custodians — BNY Mellon, Coinbase Prime, Anchorage — offer Ethereum custody as standard. And most institutional wallets that came online in the past two years are primarily Ethereum wallets.

Add to that an underrated factor: the Layer-2 layer. Anyone tokenizing on Ethereum today can settle on mainnet (security, reputation) and trade on a Layer-2 like Arbitrum or Base (speed, fees). Robinhood's tokenized US stocks work exactly like this: issuance logic on mainnet, trading on Arbitrum. That's not a future architecture, it's today's reality.

Meaning: Ethereum sells security-plus-standardization, Layer-2s sell speed-and-fees. Combined, that's a strong answer to "where do I park a tokenized asset."

Why Solana, BNB and the rest still play

If Ethereum is the obvious answer, why do the others exist?

Because "obvious" doesn't mean "without alternative." Three arguments keep the other Layer-1s in the game:

First: speed for high-frequency use cases. Anyone revaluing a tokenized stock minute by minute, or building a stablecoin payment system with mass transactions, can't operate on Ethereum mainnet. Even with Layer-2 there's residual latency. Solana with its sub-second confirmations and cent-level fees has a real advantage here. That's also why Solana's RWA growth is so heavily driven by stablecoin applications — over 90% of RWA value on Solana is stablecoins (USDC dominates, followed by USDT and PAX).

Second: specialization in specific asset classes. Stellar has positioned itself as the Treasury specialist with Franklin Templeton's BENJI. Avalanche is used by JPMorgan and Citi for institutional subnets. BNB Chain received regulatory clarity in Abu Dhabi for tokenized stocks and ETFs. Each of these specializations builds a moat against Ethereum — not in the general case, but in a specific use case.

Third: geography and regulatory focus. BNB Chain has a strong Asian user base. Stellar is strong in cross-border payments for emerging markets. These geographies aren't ETH-aligned and likely won't become so, because they have their own compliance requirements and their own wallets.

That doesn't make the Layer-1 market a winner-takes-all game. Ethereum wins the mainstream institutional use case. Solana, BNB, Stellar, and a few Layer-2s grab their subsegments. And in each of those subsegments, growth looks outsized because the absolute base is small.

How the picture shifted over the past three years

Three years back, early 2023, tokenization existed in small pilots. Centrifuge, MakerDAO with RWA collateral, a few smaller Stellar initiatives, and that was essentially the list. The total RWA market without stablecoins sat below one billion dollars.

Then two things happened in 2024: BlackRock brought its BUIDL fund to Ethereum via Securitize in March, and Robinhood started talking about tokenized US stocks in Europe. Both moves turned "tokenization is an experiment" into "tokenization is a product." By end of 2024 the market sat at roughly $6.6 billion. By end of 2025 at $18.6 billion. In March 2026 at $26.4 billion. That's a 26x growth in 36 months — excluding stablecoins. With stablecoins the figure is much larger.

The distribution shifted within that wave too. In early 2024, Ethereum had over 80% market share in tokenized values. Today it's 60-65%. That's not an Ethereum loss — the absolute value on Ethereum grew from $4B to $12B in the same window. But it does prove that other Layer-1s and Layer-2s are capturing the growth differential. Solana went from $174M to $873M in the same period — a 5x.

That's the real pattern: a growing pie, in which the leader keeps growing but loses market share. That's typically what a healthy sector in its early phase looks like.

What this means for coin prices — and where the mechanics break

Now to the question that sits at the front of most discussions: if tokenization is so big on Ethereum, shouldn't that drive the ETH price? And if Solana is growing so fast, shouldn't SOL be a layup?

The answer is more nuanced than most threads suggest. There are three mechanics through which tokenization can actually affect a coin price — and three that often get cited but don't hold up on closer inspection.

The mechanics that actually work:

1. Gas consumption and burn mechanics (especially ETH). Every transaction involving a tokenized asset on Ethereum consumes gas. Since EIP-1559, part of that gas fee gets burned, reducing ETH supply. In 2025, 1.2 million ETH were burned — that's deflationary pressure. If tokenization activity on Ethereum grows strongly, gas consumption and burn grow with it. That's a direct connection between tokenization volume and ETH scarcity.

But: Layer-2 solutions dramatically reduce mainnet gas consumption. That's intentional (scaling), but it means growing tokenization volume doesn't translate one-to-one into growing mainnet gas burn. A tokenization boom that mostly happens on Layer-2 has a much weaker effect on ETH price than one happening on mainnet.

2. Staking demand for settlement security (ETH and SOL). Anyone setting up a tokenized fund with real money on a blockchain has an interest in that blockchain being secure. Security under Proof-of-Stake means: lots of value staked. Ethereum currently has over 30% of all ETH staked, Solana over 65% of all SOL. That's real demand for the coin as a staking asset, and it tends to grow with the security requirements of the applications running on top.

But: this demand isn't linear. Above a certain staking ratio, additional security gains are marginal. Ethereum at 30% staked and Solana at 65% staked are levels where the staking-demand story has less leverage on the price than it did two years ago, when the ratios were considerably lower.

3. "Platform value" as a valuation multiplier. If you think of a Layer-1 coin not as a payment token but as a share in a settlement platform, the valuation logic resembles that of an exchange or clearing house. More volume processed on the platform means more fees, means more value for the platform. For Ethereum this is mathematically clean through the burn mechanic. For Solana it's softer, because Solana has no comparable burn mechanism — fees flow to validators rather than being burned.

What doesn't work — three commonly cited pseudo-mechanics:

1. "Tokenized assets increase demand for ETH because you need ETH to buy them." No. A tokenized Treasury token on Ethereum is typically purchased with USDC or another stablecoin, not with ETH. An investor buying a tokenized BlackRock fund holds zero ETH in the process. The transaction's gas fee is small and feeds into burn, not into purchasing demand.

2. "More assets on-chain means more DeFi usage, means more ETH consumption." In theory, yes. In practice, tokenized Treasuries and institutional funds have so far barely participated in DeFi protocols. They sit in custody wallets as buy-and-hold assets. Only once these tokens are widely used as collateral in DeFi lending or as liquidity provision will it show up in gas consumption. That's a future possibility, not a current effect.

3. "BlackRock and JPMorgan will hold ETH as an asset." Also a misunderstood story. The institutional players hold their own tokenized products. They don't buy ETH to support the blockchain — they pay gas when needed and move on. ETH as an institutional reserve asset exists in small amounts (mainly via Spot ETH ETFs), but that's a separate movement with its own logic, not directly tied to tokenization.

What should actually move coin prices

Combining the working mechanics, the picture is more sober than the loudest threads suggest:

For Ethereum: Tokenization is a slow-acting tailwind that hits the price through gas burn and staking demand. But most of the growth is shifting to Layer-2, which dampens the direct burn effect. Ethereum will likely remain the main beneficiary of the tokenization trend — but the effect on the price is medium- to long-term, not acute.

For Solana: A high-attention growth story, but the burn mechanic is missing. Solana benefits from staking demand and from the general narrative "institutional RWA money is flowing in." That has moved prices well in the past, but it's a softer mechanic than Ethereum's burn logic.

For the second tier (BNB, Stellar, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Base): This is where it gets interesting. These networks grow faster than ETH and SOL but from a smaller base. Their coins can outperform if their RWA niche succeeds — but they can also fall back completely if the market consolidates around two or three Layer-1s. That's the typical bet: higher leverage, higher downside.

For tokens with questionable RWA claims: A number of smaller Layer-1 and Layer-2 projects have marketed themselves with the RWA label since 2024 without meaningful volume actually running on their chain. These tokens ride the narrative without fundamental support. In a sector rotation toward RWA they can spike sharply in the short term — but they're also the first to fall when the narrative cools.

What's worth watching for traders and builders

We try to stay methodologically honest at Backtesting Arena and not amplify pump narratives our data doesn't support. From that logic, three concrete observation points for anyone treating the tokenization wave as an investment thesis:

1. RWA value on Ethereum as a leading indicator. If distributed RWA values on Ethereum stagnate or fall, that's a signal the tokenization wave is either cooling or shifting to other chains. Both are relevant for ETH valuation. RWA.xyz publishes this data openly.

2. Layer-2 share of Ethereum tokenization volume. If the share of tokenization activity on Layer-2 instead of mainnet grows, the direct burn effect shrinks. That's not bad news for Ethereum as an ecosystem (Layer-2s are part of it), but it's worse news for the burn-driven scarcity story around ETH. Understand this mechanic before betting on an Ethereum scarcity thesis.

3. Stablecoin distribution as a growth precursor. Stablecoins are the entry ticket for any tokenization use case. Where stablecoin volume grows, tokenized asset volume tends to follow — with a lag. Solana's high stablecoin share is therefore both a current weakness (too much concentration on one asset class) and a potential growth precursor (the infrastructure is there, other asset classes can follow).

Where we see the plug-in on the platform

Backtesting Arena currently offers no strategies directly on tokenized assets, for the reasons described in the detailed post on tokenized commodities: history too short, mechanics too specific. What we do cover is the underlying — the ETFs, stocks, commodities, and crypto assets whose tokenized variants are moving on-chain right now.

For Layer-1 and Layer-2 coins, that means: anyone developing a thesis on ETH, SOL, AVAX, ARB or similar can test it on the Arena with real data and strategies. Crypto is available as a standard asset class across all plans.

A few takeaways from our own backtests on these assets:

• ETH and SOL behave relative to each other like higher beta on BTC. SOL is usually the more volatile one. In bull phases SOL runs harder than ETH; in corrections SOL drops harder. That's not RWA-specific, but it qualifies the narrative "SOL benefits from RWA so I buy SOL" — what you're primarily buying is a higher-volatility crypto trade, with the RWA effect as one layer on top.
• Classic strategies like RSI/SMA Cross or Keltner Breakout work on ETH and SOL similarly to BTC — patterns are similar, volatility is higher. That makes risk management more important, not less.
• For a pure RWA thesis, the spot coin price isn't the most interesting backtest target — the correlation between tokenized asset volume (e.g. BUIDL TVL or USDC supply on Ethereum) and the coin price is. Those correlation analyses aren't the core of our platform, but they're an interesting analytical layer you can build on top of publicly available RWA.xyz data.

Bottom line

Tokenization is real, it's growing, and it's changing what a blockchain actually is. Step by step, "speculation casino" becomes "settlement layer for institutional assets." That's the actual story.

What this story is not: a simple long bet on ETH or SOL. The mechanics through which tokenization volume translates into coin prices are real but slower, smaller, and more indirect than the loudest crypto threads suggest. Anyone buying ETH because BlackRock tokenizes on Ethereum has a valid argument — but they should understand that this argument gets part of its leverage through gas burn and staking demand, not through direct ETH demand from BlackRock.

On a 3-5 year horizon, Ethereum is the most likely main beneficiary, with Solana as the most important challenger, and a cluster of Layer-2s and specialist Layer-1s playing in niches. What the precise ratio looks like in five years is open — growth rates currently favor the challengers, but market-leader advantages in standardization and compliance tend to outlast growth rates.

What we can say with certainty: anyone wanting to look back in five years and understand what happened won't just need to look at coin prices — they'll need to look at the distribution of tokenized value across chains. That distribution is the actual indicator. Coin prices are a derivative of it.

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FAQ

Do all Layer-1 coins benefit equally from the tokenization wave? No, the opposite. The distribution is heavily concentrated: Ethereum holds roughly two-thirds of all tokenized value, BNB Chain and Solana together come to about 12%, the rest splits across a double-digit number of smaller chains. The effect on each coin also depends not only on volume but on the coin's mechanics (burn, staking demand, fee logic).

Does an RWA boom directly drive the ETH price? Indirectly. Growing RWA activity on Ethereum increases gas consumption and thus ETH burn (deflationary pressure) and can raise staking demand. However, a growing share of activity is shifting to Layer-2, which dampens these direct effects. A strong "RWA pump thesis" on ETH typically overestimates the short-term impact.

Which Layer-1s besides Ethereum should I watch? From today's view: Solana (highest growth, strong stablecoin foundation), BNB Chain (regulatory clarity in Asia and the Middle East), Stellar (Treasury specialist with Franklin Templeton), Avalanche (institutional subnets for JPMorgan and Citi). On Layer-2: Arbitrum and Base as trading layers for tokenized stocks and funds.