Real-World Asset Tokenisation in Emerging Markets: What Cambridge’s New Report Means for Asia

A deep dive into the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance’s June 2026 study “Tokenised Assets: Pathways for Emerging Market and Developing Economies (PDF)“

For over a decade, the tokenisation debate has been dominated by the priorities of Wall Street and the City of London: fractionalising blue-chip funds, modernising wholesale settlement rails, squeezing basis points out of back-office operations. A new 121-page report from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) and Financial Innovation for Impact, published in June 2026 with support from the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, argues that this framing largely misses the point for the markets where tokenisation could matter most.

In emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), the report contends, tokenisation is not a question of integration and modernisation, as it is in advanced economies. It is a question of whether the technology can expand who participates in finance at all — and on what terms. For Asian markets from the Philippines to Kazakhstan, that distinction has real consequences.

The methodology behind the findings

The study is one of the most rigorous EMDE-focused assessments of real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation to date. It draws on desk research across 23 EMDE jurisdictions, a survey of regulators conducted through CCAF’s Regulatory Knowledge Exchange, more than 20 semi-structured interviews with regulators and policymakers, additional interviews with market participants, and a series of closed-door roundtables. Contributing institutions include the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Philippine SEC, Indonesia’s Otoritas Jasa Keuangan, the Bank of Thailand, the Dubai Financial Services Authority and ASIFMA, alongside regulators from Africa and Latin America.

Importantly, the scope is deliberately narrow. The report covers tokenised traditional assets — bonds, equities, funds, real estate, invoices, commodities, carbon credits — meaning instruments whose value is anchored in enforceable off-chain rights. Settlement assets such as CBDCs, tokenised deposits and stablecoins are excluded except where they interact with asset tokenisation, and unbacked cryptoassets like Bitcoin and ETH sit outside the study entirely.

Forget fractionalisation: the EMDE value proposition is different

Perhaps the report’s most contrarian finding concerns where the value of tokenisation actually lies. In advanced economies, fractionalisation — slicing large assets into affordable pieces — is treated as the killer feature. The CCAF researchers found that in EMDEs, the credible value proposition derives less from fractionalisation itself and more from a cluster of operational gains: reducing the administrative cost of small-denomination offerings, automating compliance and asset servicing through smart contracts, improving post-trade processes, enabling more continuous secondary-market activity, and allowing composability across platforms.

This matters because EMDE capital markets suffer from structural constraints that advanced markets do not: thin liquidity, narrow investor bases, fragmented infrastructure and large informal sectors. At the same time, many of these economies have already leapfrogged in digital finance. Mobile money, agent networks and fintech-led wallets have scaled faster than traditional banking — in the Philippines, roughly 70% of the population holds a digital wallet while only 30–40% have a bank account. The report sees tokenised instruments as a natural next layer on top of that installed base, and Philippine regulators told the researchers this gap is already beginning to be bridged.

The asset classes most likely to scale first, according to the study, are those defined by illiquidity, high intermediation costs and fragmented infrastructure: real estate, public securities, fixed income and commodities. Real estate emerged as the single most cited use case in the regulator survey (72.2% of respondents), ahead of securities (61.1%) and commodities (33.3%). Regulators described property tokenisation as the “holy grail” of tokenisation in EMDEs — while acknowledging it is also its hardest test case, given unresolved questions around land title digitisation, valuation, and legal frameworks that in most jurisdictions do not permit direct on-chain transfer of property without an SPV or REIT-like wrapper in between.

A striking perception gap between industry and regulators

One of the report’s headline data points is a pronounced disconnect between how the industry and its supervisors see the market. Market participants rated tokenisation’s strategic priority at 4.5 out of 5 and their own organisational readiness at 4.4. Regulators, by contrast, assessed actual market activity at just 2.1 out of 5 — even while assigning the topic a relatively high strategic importance of 3.9.

The interview material brings this gap to life. One regulator quoted in the study remarked that interest is “huge” but that turning it into a live product remains a long journey; another recounted receiving nearly a hundred firms declaring an intention to tokenise, followed by almost a year of silence. The pattern will be familiar to anyone who has watched Asia’s tokenisation announcements outpace actual issuance.

The report also identifies a motivational divide. EMDE market participants are primarily driven by broadening access to capital. Regulators, meanwhile, increasingly view tokenisation through a financial sovereignty lens — as a tool to retain domestic capital that would otherwise drift to offshore platforms and foreign-denominated instruments, including dollar stablecoins. The authors argue that aligning these two motivations, rather than treating them as opposed, is where the real opportunity lies.

How EMDEs are regulating: three camps, four kinds of sandbox

On the regulatory front, the study finds that no single model has emerged. Approaches fall broadly into three categories: extending existing securities frameworks, enacting bespoke virtual-asset or cryptoasset service provider regimes, and applying AML-focused registration frameworks to intermediaries. The report’s blunt assessment is that none of these approaches, applied in isolation, captures the full lifecycle of a tokenised asset. In the majority of jurisdictions analysed, regulators have yet to clarify what, when and how regulation applies to tokenised instruments at all — and where rules do exist, they concentrate on primary issuance while custody, transfer and post-trade activity remain under-specified.

Concrete examples span the report’s jurisdictions. Argentina has built an indirect tokenisation regime without new legislation, letting digital representations sit alongside book-entry securities. Kenya’s draft VASP regulations cover RWA issuance, while Botswana’s split between its Virtual Assets Act and Securities Act creates dual-licensing headaches for firms straddling both.

The largest group of regulators, however, is using sandboxes as a deliberate learning mechanism before committing to formal rules. The report offers a useful taxonomy of four sandbox types, several of which will be recognisable to Asian readers: bespoke tokenisation sandboxes (such as the DFSA’s tokenisation sandbox, Hong Kong SFC’s virtual assets sandbox and Kazakhstan’s digital financial assets sandbox); sandboxes operating under modified legal frameworks (the UK’s Digital Securities Sandbox and the EU DLT Pilot Regime); generic sandboxes that happen to admit tokenisation tests (Bahrain, Brazil, Australia); and sandbox-like pilots where authorities work directly with selected participants — the category that includes Singapore’s Project Guardian, the HKMA’s Project Ensemble and Project Genesis. The study notes that jurisdictions pairing these pilots with a strong strategic agenda, as Hong Kong and Singapore have done, tend to make the most coherent progress.

A telling detail from the regulator interviews: supervisors show a clear preference for permissioned infrastructure, at least at the testing stage, while acknowledging that market participants lean the other way. Advanced Asian markets are already experimenting with layered designs that place permissioning on top of permissionless networks to bridge that gap — an architectural compromise likely to define the next phase of institutional tokenisation in the region.

The risks: familiar problems in unfamiliar clothing

The report resists both hype and dismissal on risk. Its core observation is that most risks in tokenised markets are conventional financial risks that manifest differently. Fragmentation across non-interoperable DLT networks and custom smart-contract standards threatens to splinter already-thin liquidity. Growing interlinkages between tokenised instruments and the wider cryptoasset ecosystem create new transmission channels for financial stability shocks that existing supervisory tools may not capture.

Secondary-market liquidity is flagged as the central chicken-and-egg problem: low liquidity discourages participation, and weak participation suppresses liquidity further — a dynamic compounded in EMDEs by the scarcity of regulated on-chain settlement instruments. Legal uncertainty persists over the property rights attached to tokens, the enforceability of smart contracts, the status of private keys, and the reconciliation of operational settlement finality on-chain with legal finality off-chain.

Consumer protection receives particular attention. Fractional ownership can broaden retail access, but many EMDEs combine low financial literacy with limited investor-protection safeguards. Complex tokenised products layered on inadequate disclosure standards heighten exposure to fraud, misselling and operational failure — a warning worth heeding in Asian markets where retail appetite for digital assets already runs high.

What a viable tokenised market actually requires

Rather than ending on generalities, the report defines a “minimum viable ecosystem” for tokenisation to scale responsibly: appropriate regulatory frameworks, credible settlement infrastructure, mature digital public infrastructure (DPI) enablers, availability of industry functions across the full tokenisation lifecycle, and functioning secondary-market and redemption arrangements. The authors are emphatic that interoperability across DPI layers — payments, digital identity, registries and data systems — is the defining feature of viable tokenised market development. In other words, a country’s national ID rails and instant payment systems may matter more to its tokenisation prospects than its blockchain policy.

The takeaway for Asia

The report’s underlying message is a sober one: tokenisation in emerging markets will be determined as much by policy, legal and institutional design as by the technology itself. For Asia, which hosts both the most advanced regulatory pilots (Hong Kong, Singapore) and some of the most compelling inclusion use cases (the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand), the study effectively sketches a division of labour. Advanced Asian hubs are building the infrastructure and standards; EMDE neighbours have the demand-side conditions — wallet-first populations, underserved SMEs, illiquid property markets — where tokenisation’s social and economic payoff could be largest.

Whether those two halves connect will depend on the unglamorous work the report catalogues: clarifying custody and post-trade rules, digitising land registries, establishing on-chain settlement assets, and closing the gap between what industry says it is ready to build and what regulators see actually being built. The interest, as one supervisor put it, is the hottest thing in town. The products, for now, remain a long way off.

The full report, “Tokenised Assets: Pathways for Emerging Market and Developing Economies (PDF)” (June 2026), was produced by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and Financial Innovation for Impact and is available via the CCAF publications page.

The post Real-World Asset Tokenisation in Emerging Markets: What Cambridge’s New Report Means for Asia appeared first on Bitcoin News Asia.