Stellar's $3B tokenized-asset market meets a $2M DeFi hurdle

Stellar’s tokenized real-world asset market has climbed from roughly $785 million in January to more than $3 billion in July, yet lending pools able to accept those assets hold barely $2 million.

RedStone’s latest report found that Stellar’s RWA market expanded nearly fourfold between January and July. The growth was driven by tokenized money market funds and U.S. Treasury products. Corporate credit has added another large pool.

Several individual products have reached values usually associated with established investment funds. The Amundi and Spiko Overnight Swap Fund, a French-regulated UCITS cash-management product, has grown to hundreds of millions of dollars in onchain value since going live on Stellar in March.

RedStone’s report identified Spiko’s tokenized U.S. Treasury bill fund as another major contributor. The product had reached about $536 million. Ondo Finance’s USDY, a yield-bearing asset backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries and bank demand deposits, held more than $533 million on Stellar. Ondo expanded the product to Stellar in September 2025; its value on the network rose from slightly more than $1 million at the beginning of 2026 to over $533 million.

VuMe Bond 2030, issued under Luxembourg securitization rules, launched on Stellar in February and has since reached roughly $500 million. Franklin Templeton’s Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, launched on Stellar in 2021, uses the BENJI token and invests primarily in U.S. government securities. RedStone placed its tokenized value on Stellar at about $460 million.

Issuance records how much value has been tokenized, but not how much of it is being traded, supplied to lending markets, or used as collateral. Stellar’s decentralized finance market remains much smaller than its tokenized asset base. RedStone put total DeFi value on the network at about $259 million when its report was prepared, compared with more than $3 billion in RWAs.

Blend, Stellar’s largest lending protocol, accounted for roughly $127 million of that DeFi total. Pools able to accept RWAs, however, held only slightly more than $2 million. Templar Protocol, another Stellar lending application, allows users to borrow against assets including deJAAA, deJTRSY, CETES, and USTRY. The protocol had about $8.4 million in total value locked on the network, according to RedStone.

Why RWAs Aren’t Reaching Lending Pools

A tokenized security does not automatically become usable in DeFi simply because it exists on a blockchain. Trading venues need a defensible price before listing it. Lending protocols must keep valuing collateral even when the market for its underlying asset is closed.

Price discovery becomes harder when an onchain token represents an asset that does not trade continuously. Bitcoin, Ether, and other liquid cryptocurrencies change hands around the clock, allowing oracle providers to combine quotes from several active exchanges. Traditional assets follow different schedules. U.S. stocks trade mainly during set market hours. Government debt products may only have reliable spot prices when their domestic markets are open.

Money market funds add another complication because their value depends on the securities held in their portfolios rather than on constant secondary-market trading. Fund administrators may also distribute net asset value data through systems that cannot send information directly to a smart contract.

Corporate debt requires additional inputs, including credit quality, maturity, settlement terms, and the structure of the security. According to RedStone, an oracle must account for such differences rather than applying the same method used to price a liquid crypto token.

Royal Fool, the pseudonymous co-founder and chief executive of Templar Protocol, said dependable pricing is required before a lending market can safely accept an RWA.

“Listing a real-world asset as collateral works best if we can price it reliably around the clock.”

The executive said SEP-40 feeds allow Templar to accept real-world collateral and support borrowing against it on Stellar. Lending protocols need current prices to calculate loan-to-value ratios and determine when a position no longer has enough collateral.

Stellar’s SEP-40 Oracle Consumer Interface provides a common format through which Soroban smart contracts can request price information. Before the standard was introduced, each provider could use a separate interface, requiring developers to build a new adapter whenever they added another data source. Under SEP-40, compatible providers follow the same set of functions for identifying supported assets, price precision, update intervals, and timestamps.

RedStone joined Stellar in March and later adopted SEP-40. Materials provided with the report said the oracle provider now supports 55 price feeds covering U.S. Treasuries, sovereign debt, corporate credit, tokenized gold, and money market products. Among the covered assets are Ondo’s USDY, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, and Matrixdock’s XAUm gold token. RedStone also supplies data for Centrifuge-linked Treasury and credit products, along with tokenized Mexican and Brazilian government debt issued by Etherfuse.

Martin Quensel, founder of Anemoy and co-founder of Centrifuge, said tokenization puts regulated funds within reach of decentralized finance, while standardized pricing allows protocols to use them as collateral.

“Reliable, standardized pricing on Stellar by RedStone is what lets protocols actually use them as collateral.”

Stellar had previously added another data layer when it integrated Chainlink services in October 2025. The arrangement covered Data Feeds, Data Streams, and the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol for applications working with DeFi and tokenized assets.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation plans to add tokenized versions of DTC-custodied assets to Stellar in the first half of 2027, extending the network’s RWA pipeline into U.S. market infrastructure. As reported in May, the initial eligible assets are expected to include Russell 1000 shares, major index exchange-traded funds, U.S. Treasuries, and several classes of corporate and other bonds. DTCC received a no-action letter from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in December 2025, allowing it to test tokenized securities under specified conditions while maintaining existing investor protections.

In July, BlackRock, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Vanguard, the New York Stock Exchange, and almost 40 other institutions participated in a tokenization pilot involving stocks, ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries. Microsoft and Circle shares, the Invesco QQQ Trust, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, and BlackRock’s iShares 0–3 Month Treasury Bond ETF were among the first assets included. JPMorgan also completed a conversion of QQQ shares into a tokenized representation during the pilot. The active trial uses permissioned infrastructure, including Hyperledger Besu and Canton, while the separate Stellar deployment remains scheduled for 2027.