Untapped Assets: The Trillion Dollar Opportunity of Assetization

This newsletter is part of The Assetizer, GenTwo's thought leadership platform.

Chapter 7 of our Assetization book is entitled: “Untapped Assets – The Trillion‑Dollar Opportunity of Assetization.” In it we set ourselves a simple challenge: if assetization really worked as we described it, how big could the opportunity be?

In the book we were very clear, and we want to repeat it here: this was a back‑of‑the‑envelope exercise, not a piece of formal market analysis or an investment recommendation. We are practitioners, not research analysts, and our estimates rely on a number of simplifying assumptions. Still, we felt it was useful to get an order‑of‑magnitude sense of the assetization opportunity. In the first edition we had done something similar just for “non‑bankable” assets and came out at roughly 80 trillion dollars that could, in principle, be brought into the bankable world through securitization.

In the second edition our view of assetization was much broader, so naturally the result was too. Instead of looking only at non‑bankable assets, we looked at major pools of value that sit outside public equity and bond markets and asked what their total addressable market (TAM) might be from an assetization perspective.

How we approached the problem

We started from a simple observation: most of the world’s wealth does not sit in public markets. Listed equities and bonds account for only a slice of global asset value; the rest is in real estate, private companies, private credit, infrastructure, and a range of other assets that most portfolios still struggle to reach.

From there, we went through major “off‑exchange” asset classes and looked for reasonable estimates of the TAM or documented funding gaps. For each bucket, we asked: how big is the pool, and how much of it is currently hard or impossible for most investors to access in an efficient, investible form? We stressed that we were not forecasting how much of that value will actually be securitized or tokenized, nor how quickly. The goal was simply to show how large the reservoir becomes once you look beyond listed stocks and bonds.

The numbers, asset class by asset class

In the chapter we then walked through seven categories and attached rough TAM figures to each. Here is what we came up with:

Real estate — places of value (393.3 trillion dollars), Real estate is the original asset class: land and buildings where people live, work, shop, and produce. It remains the largest store of wealth on the planet. Drawing on Savills, we noted that the total value of global real estate reached nearly 393.3 trillion dollars at the end of 2024, split into 286.9 trillion of residential property, 58.5 trillion of commercial real estate, and 47.9 trillion of agricultural land. That is roughly three times the size of all the world’s stock markets combined, yet only a small fraction of it currently sits in investible vehicles like listed REITs and private real‑estate funds.

Private equity — ventures of value (60 trillion dollars). Here we focused on unlisted operating businesses: the hundreds of thousands of companies that generate real cash flows but never make it onto an exchange. Using data from Scientific Infra & Private Assets (SIPA), we cited an “investible” private‑equity universe of roughly 900,000 to one million private companies worldwide that are large and transparent enough to attract institutional capital, with a combined equity value of around 60 trillion dollars—more than ten times the assets then managed by global private‑equity funds. For our purposes in the book, we treated that 60‑trillion‑dollar figure as a plausible proxy for the total assetizable private‑equity market.

Private credit — value in lending (30 trillion dollars). Private credit, as we described it, is about filling the lending gap that opened up when post‑crisis regulation pushed banks to de‑risk their balance sheets and retreat from many forms of SME and corporate lending. We cited McKinsey’s estimate that the addressable market for private credit in the United States alone could be over 30 trillion dollars and, in the absence of reliable global data, we took that 30‑trillion‑dollar US figure as our working TAM. From an assetization standpoint, this represents a vast pool of loans that could, in principle, be packaged into more accessible investible products if the right structures and rails exist.

Infrastructure — foundations of value (15 trillion dollars). Infrastructure covers the essential systems that keep the real economy running: power grids, transport networks, water systems, data centers, and more. We used figures from the Global Infrastructure Hub, which estimated that the world needs to invest 94 trillion dollars in infrastructure by 2040, but is on track to fall short by about 15 trillion dollars. We treated that 15‑trillion‑dollar funding gap as the relevant TAM from an assetization perspective: a volume of future projects that could become investible if sufficient private capital can be connected to them through appropriate products.

Cryptocurrencies — tokens of value (10 trillion dollars). For crypto, we tried to strike a balance between promise and volatility. We acknowledged the history of booms and busts, frauds, and hacks, but also noted that Bitcoin and Ethereum point toward genuinely new forms of digital money and programmable infrastructure. In terms of size, we observed that the total crypto market at the time oscillated between roughly 2 and 4 trillion dollars and cited external projections that saw aggregate crypto market capitalization potentially reaching around 10 trillion dollars by 2030 as institutional adoption matures. For the chapter we treated that 10‑trillion‑dollar figure as a reasonable, if speculative, TAM for this bucket and noted that, because cryptocurrencies are already widely accessible, in principle the whole market is investible.

Passion assets — value with meaning (2 trillion dollars). Passion assets—art, wine, collectibles, classic cars, watches, and similar objects—combine financial and emotional value. We cited Deloitte’s estimate that ultra‑high‑net‑worth individuals alone hold just over 2 trillion dollars in art and collectibles. In the chapter, we framed this 2‑trillion‑dollar figure as the relevant pool for assetization, noting that even modest progress in turning “storage wealth” sitting in vaults and freeports into more liquid, fractional investible exposure would represent a meaningful expansion of the universe.

Frontier assets — new kinds of value (less than 0.5 trillion dollars today). Finally, we turned to a set of emerging experiments—music‑royalty securitizations, prediction markets, personal‑data monetization, sports‑betting platforms, and various attempts to tokenize future cash flows, reputation, or earning potential. We noted that cumulative issuance and volumes here were still well below half a trillion dollars in total and treated this as a tiny but symbolically important frontier category rather than a major TAM driver. The point we made was less about today’s size and more about how these experiments stretch the definition of what can be turned into an investible cash flow once the tools exist.

When we added up these figures—393.3 trillion for real estate, 60 trillion for private companies, 30 trillion for private credit, 15 trillion for infrastructure, 10 trillion for crypto and digital assets, 2 trillion for passion assets, plus a small frontier bucket—we arrived at a total of roughly 510 trillion dollars in potentially assetizable assets outside public markets.

The assetizable universe (255 trillion dollars)

In the book, we then took one more step, again with strong caveats. We wrote that we were well aware not all of this value will, or should, turn into tradeable paper and emphasized that many assets will remain privately held and some ideas should never become financial products. The numbers, we stressed, were meant to be rough, order‑of‑magnitude estimates.

With that in mind, we asked a simple “what if?” question: for the sake of argument, what if, over time, 50% of these asset pools ultimately became accessible in investible form—tokenized, securitized, or wrapped in liquid vehicles that investors and advisors can actually use? On that assumption, half of 510 trillion gives an “assetizable universe” of around 255 trillion dollars of additional assets entering portfolios.

We closed the chapter by noting that this was not a forecast or a target, merely a way of illustrating scale. Even if reality never comes close to that 50% scenario, the implication is clear: assetization is not about squeezing a few extra basis points out of existing products. It is about opening up a vastly larger, largely untapped universe of investible assets that sit beyond today’s public markets.

That, we argued, is quite a thought.