RWAs exceed $25 billion after almost quadrupling in one year

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

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

The milestone and continued growth, with RWA reaching the $20 billion mark by the end of 2025, continues a shift from early experimentation toward institutional-scale deployment. Asset managers including BlackRock, Fidelity and WisdomTree have launched tokenized fund products over the past year, while the number of tokenized US Treasury offerings has expanded from 35 to more than 50, according to data compiled by Nexus Data Labs.

According to data from RWA.xyz, six categories of tokenized assets have crossed the $1 billion threshold: US Treasuries, commodities, private credit, institutional alternative funds, corporate bonds and non-US government debt.

Issuance exceeds 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. On-chain transfer data shows that many of the largest RWA transactions aggregate around $10 million per transfer, a pattern consistent with batched institutional allocation rather than continuous market activity.

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

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

Nexus Data Labs estimates that there is approximately $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% are off-chain lending and trading systems, largely because the underlying assets impose compliance requirements, including KYC checks, transfer restrictions, and whitelisting.

This gap frames the central issue of the sector for the second half of the year. 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 those assets remain isolated in permissioned structures or begin to integrate with the composable collateral, lending, and trading systems that define DeFi will likely determine whether tokenization scales as a parallel settlement layer for traditional finance or becomes something structurally different.