Tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) deposited into decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platforms and exchanges have more than tripled over the past year, rising from $2.3 billion to $7.4 billion according to new data from CoinShares and Token Terminal. The increase in RWA adoption comes even as total DeFi deposits fell by approximately 15% during the same period.
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AAPLShift in trading volumes and asset concentration
The joint report, “The Growth of Hybrid Finance,” draws from Token Terminal data and covers the second quarter of 2025 through the second quarter of 2026. The findings highlight a significant divergence between the performance of traditional DeFi assets and tokenized real-world instruments on-chain. While aggregate spot volumes on decentralized exchanges declined by roughly 70% year-on-year, trading volumes for RWAs surged about 220%.
Notably, on perpetual futures venues, trading volumes and open interest in tokenized real-world assets continued to grow, even as the broader DeFi sector slowed beginning October 2025. RWAs now represent more than a quarter of open interest in on-chain perpetual futures contracts.
Tokenized Treasury and multi-strategy funds, including JTRSY, BUIDL, and sUSDS, accounted for the largest share of these assets, followed by private credit offerings like JAAA, syrupUSDC, and PRIME, as well as delta-neutral strategies such as sUSDe. Spot trading volume was led by tokenized gold, while perpetuals activity was concentrated in oil, precious metals, US equities such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, and technology and semiconductor stocks.
CoinShares co-founder and CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti commented on the trend, emphasizing that the rise of RWAs on-chain does not imply investors are leaving traditional financial markets:
Investors are not leaving traditional finance behind. Treasuries, gold, the S&P 500, semiconductor stocks—all of these are actively being used on-chain, and none is a crypto asset.
Ethereum remains dominant, but new platforms emerge
Nearly 70% of all RWA collateral is currently deposited on lending venues built on Ethereum. Plasma holds the position as the second-largest network, supported by Aave’s expansion beyond Ethereum, while Solana’s growth in the sector has been driven primarily by native RWA lending platform Kamino. The largest concentrations of deposits are found on Aave, Morpho, and Kamino.
Despite this surge in on-chain activity, the associated revenues for trading and lending platforms have not expanded at the same rate; application revenues actually declined over the past year, which the report attributes to the early stage of RWA adoption. Hyperliquid has been the key outlier, generating significantly higher application revenue than its competitors and surpassing both Solana and Ethereum as the top revenue-generating chain. In July, Decrypt reported that real-world asset volumes exceeded those of crypto assets on Hyperliquid for the first time in a single week, with semiconductor manufacturer SK Hynix recording the highest trading volume.
Market context and future outlook
Earlier in the year, tokenized real-world assets grew 8.7% month-on-month to reach $24.8 billion, while DeFi’s total value locked declined 25% to $94.8 billion. According to 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz, investors rotated capital from DeFi due to compressed yields, moving toward tokenized Treasuries offering around 4%. BlackRock, cited in the report for its BUIDL fund, has recently launched two more tokenized money market funds and introduced tokenized share classes for European money market funds collectively holding $311 billion.
However, the scale of tokenized RWAs remains limited in comparison to traditional finance. Approximately $2.2 billion of global equity—valued at over $100 trillion—has been tokenized so far, a level the report compares to stablecoins’ early market position in 2019. The analysis only considers distributed assets that can move outside their issuing platforms, and thus omits networks like Canton and Provenance.
The fast-evolving RWA sector also underscores the importance of sophisticated tools for investors. Platforms such as CryptoAppsy, which streamlines portfolio management and enables users to monitor real-time prices and market data without creating an account, are helping investors keep pace. With features like smart price alerts, curated news filtering, discovery of newly listed altcoins, and macroeconomic indicators such as Fed interest rates all accessible on a single dashboard, investors gain an edge when tracking these assets and responding to market moves.
