Stablecoins: better and faster real-world asset trade

On a Sunday evening, an investor in the U.S. tries to buy a tokenized basket of European corporate bonds.

The bonds already exist as digital tokens. The disclosure is online, the mandate is signed, the risk team has done its work. The only thing missing is the cash.

If the investor funds the trade with a traditional cross-border wire, the familiar frictions appear: banks are closed until Monday, an intermediary might hold the payment, someone needs to reconcile SWIFT messages and references before the trade is considered “good.” By the time everything lines up, the market may have moved.

Now imagine the same trade funded with stablecoins. The “cash” leg arrives in seconds on the same rails as the tokenized bonds. The platform can exchange digital cash for digital bonds in a single, all-or-nothing transaction. No cut-off times. No “let’s see if the wire lands tomorrow.”

That contrast explains, in practical terms, why stablecoins can make real-world asset (RWA) trading both better and faster.

A new cash layer at meaningful scale

To understand why this matters, it helps to look at the numbers.

By October 2025, a major research report based on on-chain data estimated that the global stablecoin market had crossed 300 billion dollars in total capitalization, with average daily transaction volumes around 3.1 trillion dollars.

Earlier in the year, industry surveys put total stablecoin supply in the 230–250 billion dollar range and measured more than 8.9 trillion dollars of on-chain volume in just the first half of 2025, highlighting how quickly this monetary layer was scaling.

On the asset side, multiple analyses show that tokenized RWAs (excluding stablecoins) reached roughly 24 billion dollars by mid-2025 and continued to grow, with one Q3 2025 market report estimating around 30–36 billion dollars of tokenized RWAs by November 2025.

So, by late 2025, markets already have:

• Tens of billions of real-world assets in token form
• Hundreds of billions of programmable “digital cash” circulating on the same networks

The key question for trading is no longer whether these two exist, but how tightly they connect.

From slow cash to synchronized tokens

For trading, a stablecoin is best understood as cash that lives on the same infrastructure as the tokenized asset.

Instead of pairing a fast, 24/7 asset layer with a slow, bank-based cash layer, both sides of the trade become tokens:

• One token stands for the asset: a bond, a fund share, a loan, an invoice claim
• Another token stands for the cash: a unit designed to track a fiat currency, such as the euro or the dollar

When the trade happens, the platform can arrange things so that either both tokens move or nothing moves. The investor’s stablecoins leave their wallet; the asset tokens arrive. If either leg fails, the transaction is simply not executed. That is atomic settlement in practice, and it cuts down settlement risk that comes from time gaps between delivery and payment.

Because these tokens live on infrastructure designed for near-instant transfer and continuous availability, finality is measured in seconds or minutes rather than in days. There is no need to wait for batch cycles like T+2, and far less room for operational breaks between what the system says and what the bank account shows.

From the point of view of a trader or portfolio manager, that means fewer failed trades, fewer breaks to reconcile, and a trading environment that behaves much more like a modern electronic market.

Faster: availability and intraday flexibility 

The speed advantage is not just about shaving a day or two off settlement. It changes how markets operate.

Since stablecoins are not tied to bank opening hours, RWA trading venues can run truly 24/7. A fund in Europe can admit investors from Asia or Latin America at whatever time suits them, with immediate confirmation that both the asset and cash legs have settled.

Liquidity providers benefit as well. Instead of parking capital for hours while waiting for wires, they can move between positions and stablecoin balances within the same infrastructure, freeing or deploying liquidity intraday as market conditions change.

On weekends, when much of the traditional financial system pauses, the stablecoin layer does not. Visa’s on-chain analytics show that stablecoin transaction volumes remain in the billions of dollars per day even on weekends, underlining that these rails already support significant economic activity outside of normal banking hours.

In other words, aligning RWA trading with stablecoin rails allows markets to operate at internet speed, instead of being constrained by legacy banking timetables.

Better: programmable cash flows and cleaner operations

Speed is only part of the improvement. The other part is process quality.

Once the cash leg is represented by stablecoins, many of the operations around an asset can be treated as code rather than as manual workflows. Coupons, dividends, repayments, and waterfalls can all be encoded as rules about how and when stablecoin balances move.

For example:

• Interest on tokenized bonds can be paid on specific dates directly to whichever wallets hold the tokens at that moment, with each payment leaving an auditable on-chain trace.
• Dividends for tokenized fund or equity positions can be distributed in stablecoins without compiling separate payment files or relying on multiple intermediaries.
• In structured credit, repayments from borrowers can be routed through predefined priority rules that send stablecoins first to senior risk tranches, then to mezzanine, then to junior pieces.

These patterns used to require spreadsheets, emails, batch uploads to banking portals, and painstaking reconciliation. On a well-designed RWA platform using stablecoins for the cash leg, they can be part of the core trading and settlement logic.

The result is not only faster settlement, but cleaner, more transparent operations, which matters for internal controls, for investors, and for regulators.

Cross-border trades with fewer moving parts

Real-world asset trading is almost always cross-border in some dimension. The assets may be originated in one country, investors may be in several others, and service providers may sit in yet another jurisdiction.

In the traditional model, this implies multi-step chains of correspondent banks, separate foreign-exchange deals, and a variety of local intermediaries, each adding time and points of failure.

Stablecoins compress that chain. When RWAs are denominated in currencies that already have deep stablecoin liquidity, investors can hold that currency directly in stablecoins and use it as their settlement asset. Subscriptions and redemptions become token-for-token exchanges between stablecoins and RWA tokens, even when the investor and the issuer sit in different banking systems.

Foreign-exchange needs do not disappear, but they can be handled by specialized on- and off-ramp providers or by trading different fiat-pegged stablecoins against each other. The underlying legal and regulatory constraints remain, yet the mechanical process of moving value becomes simpler and more predictable.

Where this leaves real-world asset trade

By late 2025, the picture looks like this:

• Stablecoins have grown into a global digital cash layer with market capitalization above 300 billion dollars and daily transaction volumes measured in the trillions.
• Tokenized real-world assets have moved from pilot projects to tens of billions of dollars in live exposure, growing several-fold in just a few years.

The real change for trading comes when these two layers are tightly integrated:

• Every subscription and redemption becomes an exchange between tokens representing RWAs and tokens representing cash.
• Trades settle almost instantly and atomically, reducing settlement risk and operational overhead.
• Coupons, dividends, and repayments become programmable cash flows rather than manual processes.
• Cross-border trades rely on a unified, software-driven settlement rail instead of a patchwork of banking links.

For end investors, this shows up as trades that settle faster, fail less, and are easier to track. For RWA platforms, the implication is more structural: stablecoins are not an optional extra; they are part of the core market infrastructure that makes better and faster real-world asset trade possible.

Token City is getting ready to launch its EU tokenized Trading and Settlement System for RWAs. You won't want to miss it!