RWAs exceed $25 billion after nearly quadrupling in one year

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

Real-world tokenized assets, excluding stablecoins, have passed $25 billion in onchain value, nearly quadrupling from around $6.4 billion a year earlier, according to data from RWA.xyz.

The milestone and continued growth as RWAs hit the $20 billion mark by the end of 2025 continues a shift from early experiments to institutional-scale implementation. Asset managers including BlackRock, Fidelity and WisdomTree have launched tokenized fund products over the past year, while the number of tokenized US Treasury offerings alone has expanded from 35 to over 50, according to data compiled by Nexus Data Labs.

Six tokenized asset categories have now crossed the $1 billion threshold: US Treasuries, commodities, private credit, institutional alternative funds, corporate bonds and non-US government debt, according to RWA.xyz data.

Issuance is faster than integration

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

Despite the growth in supply, much of the activity reflects asset issuance rather than active trading. Onchain transfer data shows that many of the largest RWA transactions cluster around $10 million per transaction.

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

Even as assets move on the chain, most remain shielded from decentralized finance.

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

The remaining 88% sit outside onchain lending and trading systems, largely because the underlying assets impose compliance requirements, including KYC checks, transfer restrictions and whitelisting.

This gap frames the sector’s key issues heading into the second half of the year. The supply of tokenized assets is growing fast enough that some projections place the market above $400 billion by the end of the year.

Whether these assets remain hidden in approved structures or begin to integrate with the composable security, lending, and trading systems that define DeFi will likely determine whether tokenization scales as a parallel settlement layer to traditional finance or becomes something structurally different.