What's the difference between "$65 billion in daily trading volume" and a "$65 billion market"?
Volume measures how much value changes hands in a day; market size (outstanding value) measures how much of the asset exists at a point in time. An asset that changes hands three times in a day counts three times in volume and once in outstanding value.
So the IMF's $65 billion can't be directly compared with the outstanding totals published by tracking platforms (definitions differ, and they sit in the tens of billions of dollars). When reading figures like these, first check whether it's a flow or a stock, then decide whether the comparison is valid.
Why does the IMF say the four barriers reinforce each other instead of standing alone?
Because leaving any one unresolved holds back the other three. If legal rights are uncertain, regulators struggle to take a clear position; if platforms stay separate and lack a common safe settlement asset, liquidity is cut into small pools and network effects never form; and with thin liquidity, institutions have little incentive to invest in resolving the legal and regulatory questions.
In short, it's a package that has to move together, and no single platform's technical improvement can solve it alone.
What actually changes when repo moves onto a shared ledger?
Repo is, in essence, borrowing cash against securities collateral with an agreed repurchase date. In the traditional process, delivering securities and cash requires reconciliation across several institutions. On a shared ledger, both legs can be completed in a single workflow, collateral is released sooner, and institutions gain flexibility in managing cash and collateral.
This describes the general mechanism; how specific systems (such as Broadridge's distributed ledger repo platform) are designed is covered in another repo-focused article on this site. The IMF report emphasizes scale and risk and doesn't detail how any single platform works.
How can an ordinary investor turn this report into a pre-purchase checklist?
Ask one question per barrier. Legal: do the offering documents say whether the Token represents shares, fund units, or merely a right to proceeds? Market: which venues does it trade on, and can it move between them? Settlement: does trading settle in stablecoins or bank money, and who is your counterparty if the issuer fails? Regulation: how does your jurisdiction classify this asset, and how is it taxed?
If any of the four can't be answered from the offering documents, that's a signal to press the issuer for more.
On October 8, 2026, the International Monetary Fund published a blog post, "What Is Needed for Tokenization to Deliver," summarizing Chapter 3 of its October Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR), "Scaling Tokenization: New Efficiencies, New Vulnerabilities." Its conclusion: most tokenized trading volume comes from repo, issuance is concentrated and trading is fragmented, and further growth requires clearing four hurdles.
According to the IMF, repurchase agreements (repo) account for the bulk of tokenized activity, averaging around $300 billion to $350 billion in daily transaction volume. Trade in other tokenized assets such as credit, money market funds, and equities adds another $65 billion in daily volume. For comparison, the IMF cites a US repo market of roughly $13 trillion a day and global capital markets of about $300 trillion in assets.
Here is the easiest place to go wrong: $65 billion is daily transaction volume, not market size and not outstanding value. The IMF text says daily transaction volume, yet some secondary reports labeled it a "$65 billion tokenized market." An asset that changes hands several times in a day is counted several times in volume, so the figure can't be compared directly with the outstanding-value totals that tracking platforms publish.
Two more details from the report. More than half of trading occurs outside traditional market hours, and around 80 percent of the Tokenized Equity trades the IMF analyzed were for amounts smaller than one share. Issuance is concentrated in the US and a few major offshore jurisdictions, while trading is spread across platforms, networks, and settlement arrangements.
The IMF names four constraints on faster growth and describes them as reinforcing one another. First, legal certainty: "Investors require legal certainty that tokenized assets represent enforceable rights." Second, regulatory clarity: "Regulators ought to clarify how existing rules apply to new ledgers and market functions." Third, interoperability: "Platforms will have to become interoperable rather than remain isolated liquidity pools." Fourth, safe settlement assets: "Settlement needs to rely on safe, widely accepted forms of money."
On policy, the IMF calls for a technology-neutral approach, clearer legal rights attached to tokenized assets, consistent rules for similar activities regardless of technology, interoperability between tokenized platforms and traditional financial systems, and continued monitoring of interconnectedness, Leverage, and liquidity risks so safeguards keep pace as markets scale. Several outlets quoting the report note that greater scale could amplify liquidity runs and contagion, with leverage from collateral reuse and automated liquidations among the mechanisms flagged.
The IMF text states the proportions and doesn't explain the cause in this passage; what follows is this site's reading, not the IMF's conclusion. Repo collateral is typically mature securities such as government bonds, tenors are short, and counterparties are institutions, so the legal relationships are simpler than in retail-facing products. Faster settlement and easier collateral movement matter most to institutions that roll funding every day. Put differently, tokenization first scaled in back-office plumbing nobody sees, not in front-end products retail investors can buy.
If you hold or plan to buy tokenized stocks or Treasury funds, this report is a reminder not to treat headline volume as proof that you can buy and sell your own product easily: the biggest number comes from institutional repo, which says little about the liquidity of the specific Token in your account. The checks you should run map onto the four barriers: what legal right the token represents in the offering documents, which venues it trades on, whether settlement runs on stablecoins or bank money (see this site's article on why banks bother with tokenized deposits when stablecoins exist), and how your jurisdiction regulates it.