Tokenised assets overtake meme coins as exchanges chase institutional listings

Centralised exchanges have materially reweighted their listing pipelines away from speculative crypto-native narratives and towards tokens with demonstrable financial utility, according to research published by CryptoRank. An analysis covering more than 10,000 listings across ten major venues — Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, Gate, MEXC, KuCoin, HTX, Kraken and Crypto.com — found that blockchain infrastructure, decentralised finance and tokenised real-world assets displaced meme coins and GameFi tokens at the top of exchange activity in the first half of 2026.

The findings mark a departure from the two preceding market cycles, in which exchange listing calendars were dominated by hype-driven, crypto-native categories. In the second quarter of 2026, exchanges prioritised blockchain infrastructure tokens, with 64 new listings, and DeFi projects, with 46, over speculative assets, CryptoRank reports. Tokenised assets — spanning equities, commodities and other real-world instruments — ranked third with 42 listings, as exchanges sought greater exposure to traditional finance instruments.

Tokenised stocks drive a structural shift

The most pronounced change in the data is the rise of tokenised assets, which became the single most-listed category across the ten exchanges in the first half of 2026. Nearly one in five new listings during the period fell into this category, compared with under 7% across the whole of 2025, according to CryptoRank’s figures.

That growth was driven primarily by tokenised stocks, with the bulk of new listings originating from a small cluster of issuers including xStocks, bStocks and Ondo’s tokenised markets. The concentration among a handful of providers underscores how nascent this category still is, even as it has come to dominate exchange listing activity by volume.

Meme coins and GameFi retreat to pre-boom levels

Memecoin listings have now declined for six consecutive quarters. Exchanges listed 196 new meme tokens in the fourth quarter of 2024, but only 41 in the second quarter of 2026 — a 79% fall from that peak and the lowest quarterly total since the third quarter of 2023, before the memecoin boom began, CryptoRank found.

GameFi tokens have suffered an even steeper reversal. Listings in the category are down 84% from their peak in the second quarter of 2024, falling to just 15 in the second quarter of 2026 — matching the lowest interest levels seen since the third quarter of 2023, when only ten such tokens were listed across the exchanges analysed.

A test of durability rather than a verdict

CryptoRank frames the shift as exchanges rewarding categories with an external, real-world anchor over those reliant on internal crypto-narrative cycles. Whether this represents a lasting reallocation of exchange risk appetite, or a temporary lull between speculative waves, will depend on whether tokenised assets can sustain their current growth rate once the present cohort of issuers is joined by others, the report notes.

For European regulators and institutional investors tracking the maturation of digital asset markets under frameworks such as MiCA, the data offers a tangible signal that exchange-level demand is moving in step with the broader push towards tokenised real-world assets, rather than being confined to niche DeFi platforms alone.

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