The on-chain tokenised asset market could expand to $4 trillion by the end of 2028, a forecast showed.

CoinPost, a blockchain media outlet, reported on Monday that Britain’s Standard Chartered expects stablecoins and real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation to split the market’s growth drivers evenly.

Geoffrey Kendrick, who leads Standard Chartered’s digital assets research, analysed that stablecoins and tokenised RWAs could each reach $2 trillion. The tokenisation market currently totals about $357 billion, with stablecoins at about $323 billion and RWAs at about $34 billion. Those figures imply the market could grow by about 11 times over the next few years.

The report cited the potential to combine with decentralised finance as a driver of growth. Standard Chartered said DeFi’s composability, which can handle multiple uses at the same time, is a strength that traditional finance does not have. It cited as an example a tokenised U.S. Treasury fund run by BlackRock. The fund holds about $2.85 billion in assets and also serves as collateral.

The next stage of market expansion was presented as a shift of institutional funds. Assets that currently exist off-chain are about 1,000 times the size of on-chain assets, and if assets aimed at institutional investors gradually move on-chain, that could provide additional momentum for growth in the tokenisation market.

The integration of traditional finance and DeFi was also assessed as already under way. Kendrick said data also show financial integration is progressing. The size of Aave, a major DeFi protocol, is comparable to the 38th-largest U.S. bank. The volume of on-chain stablecoin lending has also risen to $1.5 billion to $2 billion a day, and the average loan size is also growing, he said.

A bitcoin lending product offered by Coinbase and Morpho was cited as an example of this trend. Coinbase handles customer management, while Morpho is responsible for the lending and collateral liquidation system. The product has lent about $1.75 billion to 22,000 borrowers. That shows a clearer direction of traditional financial institutions using DeFi as infrastructure rather than directly replacing it.

A view was also presented that expanding tokenisation will not directly lead to a reduced role for traditional finance. Moody’s, a U.S. credit ratings firm, said it sees a low likelihood that the role of existing financial institutions will be completely replaced even if tokenisation spreads. Moody’s presented what it called the most realistic sustained-growth scenario in which existing companies keep a central role even if stablecoins and deposits are tokenised.

As a result, the market’s focal point is expected to be less about the size of tokenised assets itself than about which assets move on-chain and how traditional finance and DeFi will divide roles. If stablecoins and RWAs lead market expansion as Standard Chartered forecasts, tokenisation could expand more quickly beyond experimentation within the crypto market into areas that connect with existing financial infrastructure.