DWF Labs: $31B in RWAs Onchain, Under 10% Active in DeFi

DWF Labs Research says more than $31 billion in real-world assets have moved onchain. The firm estimates that less than 10% of that capital, roughly $3 billion, is actually circulating through DeFi lending markets, trading venues, or collateral systems. The rest sits in wallets as long-term positions.

That gap defines tokenization's current state. Issuance has worked. Liquidity has not.

The report points to Blackrock's BUIDL fund as an example. It holds billions of dollars in tokenized U.S. Treasury exposure. DWF Labs says the fund sees fewer than 30 transfers per month.

Andrei Grachev, managing partner at DWF Labs, called liquidity the binding constraint on scaling tokenization onchain. "What's missing is the infrastructure to make those assets tradeable at scale," he said. "Solve that, and tokenization becomes a wider market story instead of an institutional one."

The report identifies three structural barriers.

Pricing is the first. Private credit and real estate assets rely on net asset value updates that arrive daily at best. Market makers cannot quote large trades tightly on that kind of data frequency.

Settlement and redemption is the second. Many tokenized products still take days to redeem. Onchain liquidity is too thin for institutional-sized flows. Over-the-counter markets exist but remain fragmented and often inaccessible to retail users.

Regulation adds a third layer. Transfer restrictions, know-your-customer checks, and accreditation requirements make tokenized assets hard to plug into permissionless DeFi.

Those constraints have shaped who captures value so far. Asset managers issuing tokenized products have taken most of the upside. Crypto-native infrastructure providers, including lending protocols, pricing oracles, market makers, and redemption venues, have captured less.

DWF Labs says that imbalance is starting to shift.

Maple Finance has attracted more than $3.6 billion in total value locked by wrapping tokenized credit into stablecoin collateral products. Pyth and Redstone are building 24/7 pricing infrastructure for tokenized stocks and commodities. Symbiotic's Liquid Lane uses an RFQ model where market makers compete to price redemption discounts. Figure integrates origination, secondary price discovery, and settlement into one stack.

The next opportunity may sit outside the U.S. dollar market. More than 94% of tokenized assets are dollar-denominated, even though non-dollar sovereign bonds make up a large share of traditional fixed income. DWF Labs highlights emerging-market debt, including Brazilian real bonds yielding around 10% and Turkish lira bonds near 15%, as a gap waiting to be addressed.

Tokenized commodities and equities also show room. Commodities already have demand. Tokenized stocks have grown to more than $1 billion with 185,000 holders in about a year.

Citigroup is creating a blockchain-based service that lets wealthy and institutional clients trade exposure to private companies through tokenized depositary receipts. That move, first reported in February, reinforces the same thesis: the bottleneck is not issuance but liquidity.

DWF Labs's report suggests the market is still early in that transition. The bulk of tokenized capital is waiting for infrastructure to catch up.