Private equity is one of the largest asset classes in global finance, and one of the least accessible in practice. Industry estimates place global private equity AUM at roughly $8.5–$9T by mid-2025. By comparison, the entire onchain real-world asset (RWA) universe is still under $25B, with RWA protocols at roughly $17B in DeFi TVL.

That gap implies a simple starting point: well under 0.2% of private equity value has any meaningful tokenized representation today. By contrast:

• Tokenized Treasuries and money-market products: Over $10B in value.

• Tokenized public stocks: About $808M in value and roughly $2.25B in monthly transfer volume, with >154k holders.

• RWA growth cadence: RWA TVL increased from roughly $5.5B to $18B across 2025.

In other words, the liquidity rails are being built, but the largest, highest-margin part of the traditional alternatives stack (private equity) is barely represented. Tessera is explicitly targeting this gap.

Tessera’s Product Architecture

Tessera is positioning around a specific niche: onchain instruments that mirror private equity economics, distributed with low minimums and designed for secondary trading.

Underlying exposure

Tessera designs instruments that aim to provide “identical economic exposure” to private equity stakes in companies such as SpaceX, OpenAI, and xAI.

Backing and verification

Tokens are one-to-one backed via institutional-grade custody and on-chain proof mechanisms such as Chainlink. The credibility of this layer will be central, because private-market exposure is only as strong as the enforceability of the link between token and underlying asset.

Access layer

Minimum ticket size is as $1, with no accreditation or KYC at the protocol level. This is a significant departure from traditional PE funds, where minimums often start in the $250k–$1M range and are restricted to accredited or institutional investors. By compressing that down to $1, Tessera is effectively re-segmenting private equity into a long-tail retail and global DeFi audience.

Market & liquidity layer

Positions are designed to trade permissionlessly on DEXs with instant settlement. This matches broader RWA market behavior: most RWA TVL currently resides on public, composable L1/L2 networks where DeFi infrastructure (AMMs, lending markets, aggregators) can treat tokenized assets like any other collateral. That composability is crucial for secondary liquidity and for building structured products on top of Tessera exposures.

Alignment With RWA Trends

Mapping out Tessera’s design to sector-level data from RWA.xyz and DefiLlama, several key points stand out:

Shift Beyond Fixed-Income

• The RWA stack today is skewed toward fixed-income: Treasuries, private credit, money-market funds. Equity-like tokenization (stocks, funds, and especially private equity) is materially smaller (~$808M in tokenized public stocks, and a far smaller subset in PE).

• Tessera is directly addressing that imbalance. Given the size and return profile of private equity as an asset class, even a single-digit basis-point penetration into tokenization would represent tens of billions in potential on-chain notional, far beyond today’s equity RWA footprint.

Retailization & Global Distribution

• RWA.xyz data shows 620k+ RWA holders and 220M+ stablecoin holders globally. Those stablecoins are the de-facto settlement layer of on-chain finance and the likely funding source for future RWA allocations.

• Tessera’s $1 minimum and permissionless design are tailored to that base: any stablecoin holder can, in principle, reallocate part of their on-chain cash into fractional private equity exposure. That’s structurally different from traditional PE funds that rely on a small pool of institutional LPs.

Composability & Secondary Markets

• One of the main criticisms of early RWA experiments was opaque pricing and poor secondary liquidity. By centering its product design around DEX trading and instant settlement, Tessera is effectively betting that price discovery should happen on-chain, in the same venues where DeFi natives already trade.

• This is consistent with broader 2025-26 RWA predictions: industry analysts expect secondary markets and collateralization use-cases to be among the key drivers of sustained RWA dominance in DeFi.

Metrics To Watch

For an institutional or sophisticated crypto-native audience tracking Tessera’s progress, a few leading indicators stand out:

1. Notional exposure tokenized: Total value of PE exposure (e.g., SpaceX, OpenAI, xAI) represented on-chain via Tessera instruments. Benchmarked against the $19–21B current RWA universe.

2. Holder count and concentration: Number of wallet addresses holding Tessera tokens, distribution between retail and larger addresses, and comparison with the 620k RWA holders base.

3. Secondary-market depth and turnover: Daily and monthly volume on DEXs where Tessera instruments trade, bid-ask spreads, and depth at 1–2% price impact. Public stock RWAs currently do $2.25B in monthly transfer volume and that’s a useful benchmark.

4. Yield and tracking error: For structures that mirror private equity funds or synthetic exposures, tracking error vs. reference NAVs and realized performance will be critical to assess whether “identical economic exposure” is being achieved.

5. Integration footprint: Listings on aggregators, inclusion in RWA indexes, adoption as collateral in lending markets, and coverage on RWA data platforms like RWA.xyz and DefiLlama.

Takeaways

As of January 2026, the numbers make it clear: RWA is no longer a narrative; it’s a measurable, fast-growing sector with $17B+ in DeFi TVL and nearly $21B in tokenized assets. But within that, private equity remains structurally under-represented.

Tessera’s thesis is straightforward:

• Take a trillion-dollar asset class (PE) with limited liquidity and access.

• Build onchain instruments that mirror the underlying economics, with $1 minimums and DEX liquidity.

• Plug those instruments into the same RWA infrastructure that has already proven itself for Treasuries and credit.

If the broader RWA sector continues compounding at the growth rates seen in 2023–25, the platforms that successfully tokenize higher-margin, higher-profile assets like private equity are likely to capture outsized share of both attention and capital.

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Tessera is positioning itself exactly there and the metrics outlined above will show whether it converts that positioning into durable on-chain market share.