RWA exceeds $25 billion after almost quadrupling in one year

Six asset classes now exceed $1 billion on-chain, but only 12% of the RWA-backed stablecoin supply has entered DeFi protocols.

Real-world tokenized assets, excluding stablecoins, surpassed $25 billion in on-chain value, nearly quadrupling from $6.4 billion about a year earlier, according to data from RWA.xyz.

This milestone and continued growth, as RWAs reach the $20 billion mark by the end of 2025, continues the shift from early experimentation to institutional-scale deployment. Asset managers including BlackRock, Fidelity and WisdomTree have launched tokenized fund products over the past year, while the number of tokenized offerings from the U.S. Treasury alone has grown from 35 to more than 50, according to data compiled by Nexus Data Labs.

According to data from RWA.xyz, six tokenized asset classes have now crossed the $1 trillion threshold: U.S. Treasuries, Commodities, Private Credit, Institutional Hedge Funds, Corporate Bonds, and Non-U.S. Government Debt.

Emission goes beyond integration

Nonetheless, much of the activity reflects asset issuance rather than active trading.

Despite the growth in supply, much of the activity reflects the issuance of assets rather than active trading. On-chain transfer data shows that many of the largest RWA transactions cluster around $10 million per transfer, a pattern consistent with institutional allocation clustering rather than continued market activity.

A February 2026 survey from tokenization platform Brickken reinforced this point: 53.8% of tokenized asset issuers said capital formation and fundraising efficiency are their primary motivation for tokenization, while only 15.4% cited liquidity.

Even when assets are transferred on-chain, most remain isolated from decentralized finance.

Nexus Data Labs estimates that there is about $8.49 billion in RWA-backed stablecoin supply, but only about $1 billion, or 11.8%, is currently deployed in DeFi protocols.

The remaining 88% is outside of on-chain lending and trading systems, largely because the underlying assets impose compliance requirements, including KYC checks, transfer restrictions, and whitelisting.

This gap poses the central question for the sector as the second half approaches. The supply of tokenized assets is growing fast enough that some projections put the market above $400 billion by the end of the year.

Whether these assets remain siled into permissioned structures or begin to integrate with the composable collateralization, lending, and trading systems that define DeFi will likely determine whether tokenization evolves as a parallel settlement layer for traditional finance or becomes something structurally different.