Southeast Asia drives 81.9% of Bitget RWA trading volume: report

Crypto exchange Bitget and crypto analytics firm Block Scholes said in a report released on April 21 that Southeast Asia accounted for 81.9% of real world asset trade volume on Bitget in the first quarter of 2026.

Traders used tokenized assets to react to macro and geopolitical events outside traditional market hours.

The report said Southeast Asia also had the largest share of active traders at 26.2%, followed by South Asia at 20.5% and the Middle East and Africa at 18.4%, while other regions each accounted for less than 16%.

It added that bitcoin’s correlation with major equity indexes rose to its highest level since late 2025, which the authors linked to markets responding to the same macro factors.

🔗 Source: Bitget

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Tokenized assets allow round-the-clock trading but may not include standard investor rights

These products are usually tokenized versions of stocks, commodities, real estate, or other holdings. In some cases, they act like synthetic derivatives that track an asset’s price, or wrapped versions of the asset, rather than the security itself 1.
That setup lets Bitget users trade at any hour and respond to global events when stock exchanges are closed 2.
Buyers may not get the same legal rights as direct shareholders. Voting rights may be absent, and dividend treatment can differ from directly held shares 1.
Prices can track the underlying asset more closely during market hours. Gaps can widen overnight or on weekends when those markets close, and minting or redemption pauses 2.

Crypto exchanges are adding more products while tokenized stocks mostly attract current crypto owners

Trading in tokenized stocks appears to come mostly from people who already own cryptocurrency, not from a separate wave of new users 2.
That pattern appears in an analysis by Block Scholes, a crypto analytics firm 2.
The push fits a broader effort by crypto exchanges to become one-stop venues for digital assets and tokenized versions of traditional instruments 2.
In practice, the approach keeps stock-like exposure inside crypto platforms. It does not, by itself, prove a broad inflow of traditional-finance users 2.