The barriers that don't decay

Sygnum's APAC Tokenization Report 2026 surveyed 212 HNWIs and professional investors across Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea, and the number everyone will quote is 68%: the share already holding tokenised RWAs. I'd discount that headline heavily, and I think the report's authors quietly would too. 83% of the sample holds crypto, 97% of the RWA holders do, and the survey couldn't cleanly separate stablecoin balances from tokenised securities in the exposure question, which the report concedes needs refining. This is a portrait of the crypto-curious wealthy, not of Asia's wealth market. What it measures is the vanguard.

That doesn't make it worthless. Surveys of vanguards are useful if you read them for the right thing, and buried in this one is the most useful piece of allocator data I've seen this year: the same barrier list, asked of people who haven't allocated and people who have. The comparison splits cleanly in two:

• Barriers that decay with experience: lack of regulated custody falls from 56% of pre-allocators to 19% of invested respondents. Lack of track record falls from 37% to 8%.
• Barriers that don't: legal ownership rights only drift from 51% to 40%. Secondary market liquidity sits flat at 43% on both sides of the line. Regulatory uncertainty barely moves, 40% to 33%.

Read that way, the chart is a map of what actually needs solving. Custody fear is a familiarity problem: MAS- and SFC-licensed custodians exist, and once an investor has used one, the objection evaporates. Track record is the same; it fixes itself with every quarter that passes without incident. But 40% of investors who already hold tokenised assets still worry about what a token legally entitles them to own, and thin secondary liquidity worries allocated investors exactly as much as it worries the sidelined. Experience doesn't cure those, because they aren't perception problems. They're facts about the law and the market.

Which is where I'd push back on the report's own conclusion. The foreword closes by declaring the remaining barriers "infrastructure questions" and the buy-side ready, a natural thing for a regulated infrastructure provider to conclude. The report's own data says something more interesting: the infrastructure questions are the ones already decaying. What persists, ownership rights and exit liquidity, isn't infrastructure anyone can sell you. One is a legislative and case-law problem, the kind Hong Kong's review of DLT debenture registers and Singapore's prudential consultations are slowly chipping at. The other is a market-depth problem that only market makers committing balance sheet can fix.

Two other findings deserve more attention than they'll get:

• 24/7 settlement ranked dead last as an investment rationale, 25% for HNWIs and 22% for professionals. The industry's standard pitch leads with always-on settlement, and this buyer base doesn't care, because most of what they're buying (treasuries, MMFs, private credit) is held for yield, not traded at 3am. Diversification leads at 72%. The pitch and the buyer have been misaligned for years, and here's a survey saying so in numbers.
• Professionals are 40% blockchain-agnostic and HNWIs lean public chains at 42%. The assumption that TradFi money requires permissioned rails keeps failing to show up in actual buy-side preferences. They want the product to work; the rail is the issuer's problem.

There's also a genuine demand signal in here: more than 80% of intended allocations involve fresh capital rather than reallocation, and allocation intent rises monotonically with self-rated knowledge, from 44% of the lowest-knowledge band planning a 5%+ allocation to 76% at the top. Intent isn't deployment, and the sub-$1m modal ticket tells you adoption is still early position-sizing. But the shape of the curve matters: the cheapest lever for inflows in this market is education, not another issuance platform.

For product owners and distributors in APAC, I'd read this survey backwards. Don't build for the objections that decay; time and familiarity are already handling those. The durable franchises will belong to whoever fixes the 2 barriers that don't: legal finality of token ownership, which is a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction legislative grind, and secondary depth, which is a balance-sheet commitment. Everything else on the barrier chart is marketing that hasn't finished working yet.