Why do tokenized real-world assets raise capital but never actually trade?

Over 25 billion dollars in tokenized real-world assets sat on-chain as of mid-2026, yet a June 2026 paper covering nine major RWA products found that most show negligible turnover, passive holder bases, and near-zero secondary market activity. Tokenization creates a token that legally represents an asset but does not create a buyer, a market maker, or a clearing convention that traditional exchanges provide. Regulatory fragmentation confines potential buyers to the handful of jurisdictions with clarity, so the addressable liquidity pool for any one token is a tiny fraction of the global investor base. The result is that issuers use blockchain as a fundraising rail and then stop, because the secondary market infrastructure, the custodian connections, and the AMM design for illiquid assets simply do not exist yet.