According to Forbes, the market for tokenized real-world assets is projected by McKinsey and BCG to reach a staggering $4 to $16 trillion by 2030, yet its current value excluding stablecoins is still just in the low billions. This massive gap highlights a fundamental misunderstanding of liquidity drivers, where the industry has overly focused on the tokenization layer itself. A key example is in private aviation, a $40+ billion market where assets like jets sit idle 95% of the time. Firms like AriyaX Capital, founded by Adnan Deeb, are pioneering a data-first model, placing aircraft into regulated SPVs with tokens representing rights to data streams like charter utilization, with over $10 million in pipeline interest. The broader shift is toward assets with pre-existing verifiable data, like music royalties or renewable energy production, where the blockchain is the ledger but the data provides the actual value.
The Data Gap
Here’s the thing that a lot of crypto and fintech folks got wrong: putting a deed or an asset title on a blockchain doesn’t magically make it liquid. It just makes an illiquid thing digital. The real barrier has always been opacity—the lack of clear, continuous, and trustworthy data about how that asset is actually performing. Forbes points out that for years, the sector “parochially prioritized the tokenization layer over the underlying asset intelligence itself.” That’s a fancy way of saying everyone was obsessed with the “how” of putting it on-chain and completely ignored the “what” that gives it value off-chain.
Think about it. Would you buy a fraction of a private jet if all you got was a digital certificate saying you own a piece of it? Probably not. But what if your token was directly linked to a live dashboard showing its flight hours, lease revenue, and maintenance status? That’s a different story. The platforms gaining real traction now are the ones that figured this out first. They built the data foundation before the financial product. It seems so obvious in hindsight, right?
From Hangar To Instrument
The private jet example from AriyaX is almost a perfect case study. These are monstrously expensive assets that are hilariously inefficient. They cost millions to buy and up to $2 million a year just to maintain, but they fly only about 400 hours a year—a 4.5% utilization rate. For an investor, that’s a depreciating liability sucking cash in a hangar, not an asset.
AriyaX’s model, through its AXPT capital framework, tries to flip that script. They’re not just tokenizing the metal. They’re tokenizing the performance of the asset by putting it in a legal SPV and tying the token’s value to the data stream it generates. So an investor gets exposure to the cash flow and resale upside without ever having to think about hiring a crew. It’s turning a luxury toy into a yield-bearing financial instrument. This is the kind of practical, unglamorous work—legal structuring and data integration—that actually moves the needle, not more token hype.
The Blueprint Is Spreading
And this isn’t just about jets. The same pattern is popping up everywhere you find verifiable data streams. Music royalties? Perfect. Streaming platforms already provide the auditable play counts. Trucking equipment? Fleet telematics allow lenders to underwrite based on real-time driving data instead of just credit scores. Renewable energy farms in Europe? Utilities are tokenizing them with returns tied to real-time production metrics from the turbines or solar panels.
The common thread is that the data layer was established first. The token is just a neat, tradable wrapper for access to that data and its economic benefits. This directly attacks the “illiquidity discount”—that 20-30% penalty illiquid assets like real estate or art trade at because of uncertainty. When you can see the performance data in real-time, the uncertainty shrinks, and so should the discount. This is huge for business leaders sitting on portfolios of physical assets. The mandate now is asset instrumentation—making your fleet, your property, or your inventory a digital platform that transmits performance data. For industries reliant on heavy machinery and operational data, understanding this shift is critical. Firms that provide the hardware to make such instrumentation possible, like industrial panel PC suppliers, become key enablers in this new stack.
Infrastructure Over Theater
So what does this mean for the next few years? Basically, we’re moving from innovation theater to a deployment phase that rewards infrastructure. Larry Fink might be right that this is like the internet in 1996, but that means we’re past the “look, a website!” phase and into the “how does this actually create value?” phase.
The winning businesses will be those that view their physical assets as digital platforms first. The blockchain provides the immutable ledger, sure. But let’s be real: the data provides the value. As Forbes concludes, anyone eyeing that multi-trillion-dollar opportunity needs to focus on “building a verifiable, updated source of truth that backs the token.” Without that, you’re just digitizing a paperweight.
