IMF finds tokenized stocks swing about 1.5 times as hard as the real shares, and 80% of trades are for less than one share

Tokenized stocks are giving investors what they asked for, trading at all hours and in small sizes, but the market is thinner and jumpier than the one it copies, the International Monetary Fund says.

In a chapter of its October 2026 Global Financial Stability Report, the IMF studied the five most liquid tokenized US equities, which track the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100, Tesla, Google and Nvidia and are issued by Ondo and xStocks, across 11 trading venues. More than half of the activity took place outside regular US market hours, and about 80% of trades were for less than one share.

The costs showed up too. Realized volatility was about 1.5 times that of the underlying shares, and the tokens were considerably less liquid, especially on decentralized exchanges. "Tokenized markets today remain relatively illiquid and exhibit higher volatility than traditional counterparts," IMF authors wrote in a blog post on October 8.

The market is still small. The IMF puts tokenized equities at about $2.3 billion, within a public market for tokenized real-world assets of about $65 billion as of July, not counting repos. For that reason it says systemic risks remain limited for now.

Before the market grows, the fund wants legal certainty for tokenized assets, settlement in safe money, ideally central bank money, and circuit breakers and liquidity safeguards for round-the-clock trading. CoinDesk reported on the findings on Sunday.