What tokenization genuinely improves
Many real-world assets are illiquid not because there's no demand for them, but because the traditional process for buying, selling, or holding a partial stake in them is slow and expensive. Commercial real estate, for example, is traditionally sold as a whole property or through investment structures with high minimums, long settlement times, and significant legal overhead for every transaction. Tokenization can genuinely improve this by fractionalizing ownership into small, standardized, transferable units, letting someone hold a much smaller stake than traditional structures would allow, and letting that stake be transferred nearly instantly on-chain instead of going through a multi week closing process each time.
This lower barrier to entry and easier transferability is a real structural improvement, not just a marketing claim. It can open participation to a wider set of investors who couldn't meet traditional minimums, and it can reduce the friction and cost of each individual transfer, since moving a token is far cheaper and faster than re-executing legal paperwork for a partial real estate sale every time. For asset classes where the underlying legal wrapper is solid and well administered, this is one of the most credible, concrete benefits that RWA tokenization offers over the traditional alternative.