Whenever I explain tokenization to someone new to it, I use the same example: take a building and imagine dividing it into digital shares. As an explanation, it works every time. As a market, it hasn’t. On the most-cited tracker of tokenized assets, real estate is less than 1% of the market, and energy doesn’t have a category of its own. Most of the value sits in Treasuries, credit funds, and commodities, assets that need no explaining. A building does, and so does a power plant.

How big is the tokenized market?

At first glance, tokenization appears to be taking off. On the tracker’s own count, investors now hold about $39 billion of tokenized assets directly, excluding stablecoins. That’s more than twenty times its figure at the start of 2024. A larger number you may have seen, about $368 billion, mostly records short-term lending between financial institutions. Yet for all that growth, real estate still accounts for less than 1%. The surprising question isn’t why tokenization is growing. It’s why so little of that growth is reaching real estate and infrastructure.

Why tokenized real estate stays small

When you look inside the real estate category, you find about 80 tokens. Almost all are for single properties, most are worth less than a million dollars, and each was tokenized on its own. In many cases, the value shown today is the same as on the day the token was issued. Whoever holds the token is left with a familiar problem. Holding a small interest in a building is easy; understanding what it’s worth is not, especially when that value rests on appraisals and judgement rather than a market price.

Black-and-white view of older office buildings in a dense city: brick towers rising behind the cornice of a stone facade.

There are structural reasons why the market stays small. Property already has listed trusts that give investors small, tradable stakes in buildings, so a token for a single building competes with something that already works. Much of the cost of issuing an asset, and of understanding it, is fixed, so splitting a building into smaller pieces doesn’t make either cheaper. And the token only records who holds what; tenants, leases, and repairs still happen off-chain.

On paper, tokenization makes property easier to reach and quicker to trade, yet the harder problem has always been knowing what you’re buying, and finding someone else who wants it.

What has worked instead

What has worked is the opposite kind of asset. Tokenized Treasuries are the largest category, about 37% of the total, and credit funds and commodities make up most of the rest. Their risks are already legible. A Treasury’s terms are standard, its price is published every day, and the US government stands behind it. Many of these tokens were also issued by large, familiar asset managers, so the token inherits its credibility from institutions that already exist.

A building or a power plant is different. Its risks have to be discovered, one asset at a time. That’s the lesson I take from the numbers: liquidity starts with a common understanding of value, long before it starts with a marketplace. Commodities are physical too, and they make up 13% of the total. The dividing line is whether an asset can be understood from standardized information, or depends on knowledge that rarely travels with the asset itself.

What a solar plant shows, and what it doesn’t

A solar plant sits somewhere between a Treasury and a building. Look at it from the outside, and much of what matters is observable. Production is monitored remotely, the US Energy Information Administration publishes how much each larger plant produces, and in most of the country wholesale power prices are published every day. While a power purchase agreement is in force, the economics can look almost bond-like: one buyer, an agreed price, and years of contracted revenue. Even then, the buyer’s credit, the gap between where the plant delivers and where the contract settles, and later amendments all shape what that price is worth.

Still, the information a buyer or lender ultimately needs is only partly visible. The market price of electricity can be observed; the terms of power purchase agreements usually can’t. Berkeley Lab, which collects these prices from public filings, found them for 40 solar projects that came online in 2025, a year in which EIA counts about 700 new utility-scale solar plants. Production figures are public too, but the repairs, equipment history, and operating choices that explain them usually aren’t.

The distinction matters because the contract ends long before the plant does. Once contracted revenue rolls off, the plant is judged less like a bond and more like an operating business. In my experience, that’s when lenders become far more cautious, and the same plant can suddenly support much less debt. The physical asset is the same; the questions asked of it change.

What happens at the end of a plant’s life?

A solar plant doesn’t stay the same over the life of a token. Panels degrade, equipment is replaced, contracts expire, and eventually the owner has to choose what comes next: extend the plant’s life, rebuild it with new equipment, or decommission it. Wood Mackenzie expects more than 2.5 terawatts of wind and solar, across the markets it covers, to face that choice in the 2040s, though it stresses the timing is uncertain. Each path depends on records the token itself doesn’t contain:

Every year takes something off a plant’s remaining life, but plants don’t age at the same rate. From what I’ve seen, age explains surprisingly little. Equipment quality, installation standards, location, technology choices, and years of operating decisions all leave their mark, so two plants built the same year can be in very different condition a decade later.

What tends to outlast the equipment is the site, with its grid connection, its permits, and the support of the community around it. Wood Mackenzie notes that some companies now buy operating plants specifically to rebuild them. Those rights sit in documents that have to travel with the plant.

For a token, this raises a harder question. A token’s terms are set when it’s issued, while the plant beneath it keeps changing. Someone still has to manage the plant, and every choice they make, from replacing equipment to rebuilding or retiring it, is now made on behalf of many holders. They may want different things, from near-term distributions to long-term value, and reconciling them can take time.

A reserve set aside at the start, or decision rights written into the terms, could help; I haven’t seen either tested at scale. Could that be part of why so few buildings and power plants have been tokenized?

A bond’s end is written on the day it’s issued. A plant’s end is written by everything that happens to it.

Why tokenize a power plant at all?

A token could sit almost anywhere in a project’s financing, from the debt to the plant itself. The closer it sits to one plant, the more its holders depend on understanding that plant.

If you’ve financed a project, you know that lenders and tax investors are sized on the plan. The truth is that plans change: in my experience, costs often run over, contracts end, equipment rules shift, and rates move, as they did when the Fed raised its policy rate in September. Energy infrastructure is never finished; it has to be managed for decades, and many of its key moments, from a contract’s end to the replacement of major equipment, can be seen coming years ahead. Owners need a way to plan for them, decide on them, and fund them. That becomes much easier when every holder can see how the asset is actually performing.

What a token could add, I think, is a different kind of holder. Much of today’s capital is built around an exit date that comes long before the plant’s end; a token could bring in people interested in the asset itself and the strategic benefits it produces over its whole life, as long as they choose to stay.

All of this is hardest for the smallest plants. Seven in ten US utility-scale solar plants are 5 MW or smaller, and the cost of understanding each one doesn’t shrink with its size. The case looks better for plants that have run for some years, because much of a new plant’s value comes from tax credits that go to investors with large tax bills.

Most investors would probably choose a portfolio over a single plant, and honestly, I would do the same. Portfolios absorb some of the uncertainty that comes with owning real assets by spreading it across many of them. Even so, someone has to understand each plant. Tokens for single plants might even turn out to be practical building blocks, ones that portfolios could be assembled from and reshaped over time.

What’s missing

When you put the pieces together, the gap becomes specific. A solar plant has a contract that sets its revenue, a history that explains its output, an ownership structure the company on record rarely shows, and an end date that depends on all three. Each needs explaining, and there’s no standard record of any of them.

Earlier posts in this series looked at how a renewable energy asset’s history gets lost, how it could be kept, and what it might look like.

Information still has to be trusted. A Treasury token inherits its credibility from institutions that already exist. Information about a plant would need someone to stand behind it too.

What would have to be true for a building or a power plant to be as easy to hold as a Treasury?

Sources

Figures checked on 22 October 2026; market figures change daily.

This post is commentary, not investment advice.