What happened
Sebastian Pulido, who leads research on tokenized assets at Grayscale, told CryptoBriefing that the industry has to shift its scorecard. The current metric, total value tokenized, tells you issuance is working. It doesn't tell you whether those assets are doing anything productive once they land on-chain.
Pulido's argument, as reported Thursday, is that tokenized real-world assets should be judged on utility: are they earning yield, serving as collateral, settling faster, or unlocking a market that wasn't accessible before. If the answer is no, the token is a wrapper, not a product. The remarks were published by CryptoBriefing on October 30 and frame a position Grayscale appears ready to take publicly as the firm leans further into the RWA category.
Why it matters
The tokenized asset market has grown on an issuance narrative. Count the treasuries, count the private credit vaults, count the equity pilots, and the chart goes up and to the right. Pulido is challenging that framing from inside one of the largest crypto asset managers.
That matters because Grayscale sits in front of the exact allocator base, RIAs, family offices, institutional desks, that the RWA category is trying to pull in. If Grayscale's research arm is telling clients to discount tokens that don't produce yield or clear a settlement bottleneck, the capital that was going to chase the headline number starts asking harder questions. The headline looks bullish for RWAs.
The flow picture, if allocators adopt this filter, gets more selective fast.