Stellar’s tokenized assets 4x'd to $4B this year asset managers make bigger moves onchain

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Getting to the first billion dollars is a milestone worth celebrating for any company. But when Stellar saw tokenized assets on its network quadruple to $4 billion in less than a year, for Raja Chakravorti (@rajachak75), chief business officer at the Stellar Development Foundation (@StellarOrg), it was a validation of the work the team had done to prepare the network.
In fact, Chakravorti said that Stellar's compliance infrastructure, which was built into the protocol years before institutions came looking for it, meant the network was ready when firms did come knocking as they realized tokenization’s potential.
Chakravorti pointed to Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund as an example, saying the tokenized money market fund launched on Stellar in 2021 and grew substantially over the years as rising yields made onchain money market instruments competitive with their traditional counterparts, Chakravorti noted. WisdomTree followed a similar path, and BlackRock's BUIDL also started trading on Stellar.
“A lot of that was driven by existing asset managers who decided to make a bet on tokenization,� Chakravorti shared on @StrataMedia_’s @_TalkingTokens podcast on the sidelines of RWA Summit recently.
"The assets grew because the use case worked."
That compliance layer is rarely talked about, as the network’s ability to freeze assets, set authorization requirements, and control who can hold a given token has been baked in since its early years. "We built those tools because cross-border payments and remittances required them," Chakravorti said. "It turned out institutions needed the same things."
The broader tokenized asset market used to be worth less than $1 billion in early 2023, but today, it’s worth roughly $25 billion across all chains. Chakravorti acknowledges that the growth is unique to Stellar. Rising interest rates made yield-bearing tokenized instruments attractive while regulatory clarity improved. Asset managers got comfortable enough with digital assets to move from experiments to actual products.
"The conditions came together," he said. "We were just positioned to take advantage of them."
The next wave is where things get more exciting (and arguably more uncertain), as the money market fund space has largely been captured by early movers such as BlackRock, WisdomTree, KKR, Hamilton Lane and Franklin Templeton.
Future products that tap tokenized credit, more complex fixed income, or assets without clean existing market structures may have to deal with longer due diligence cycles and stricter regulatory questions, Chakravorti said.
In the near term, Stellar’s focus is on tapping agentic payments to grow its business, as its infrastructure can be baked into cheap cross-border transfers, and can map easily to what AI agents transacting in stablecoins will need.
"That's one of the most exciting things coming," he said. "Agents transacting with each other using onchain infrastructure that already works."