Tokenized RWA Deposits Triple to $7.4B as DeFi Falls

Deposits of tokenized real-world assets into decentralized lending platforms and exchanges tripled over the past year to $7.4 billion from $2.3 billion, according to a report published Thursday by asset manager CoinShares and on-chain data provider Token Terminal. Total deposits across decentralized finance fell about 15% over the same period.

The report, titled The Growth of Hybrid Finance, is the pair's second joint publication. It covers the second quarter of 2025 through the second quarter of 2026, with all data supplied by Token Terminal.

The divergence repeats across markets. Spot volumes on decentralized exchanges fell roughly 70% over the period, while volumes in tokenized real-world assets rose about 220%. On perpetual futures venues, both trading volumes and open interest in real-world assets kept climbing through a broader slowdown that started in October 2025. Real-world asset positions now make up more than a quarter of on-chain perpetuals open interest.

Tokenized Treasury and multi-strategy funds, including JTRSY and BUIDL, account for the largest share of deposits. Private credit products such as JAAA and syrupUSDC follow, along with delta-neutral strategies like sUSDe. Gold leads spot trading volume among tokenized assets. Perpetuals activity concentrates in oil, precious metals, equity index products and semiconductor stocks. Equity-linked tokenized products have drawn particular demand this year; the Tokenized QQQ drove 288% of July volume, according to AlphaScala's earlier coverage.

Almost 70% of real-world asset deposits sit on lending venues built on Ethereum. Plasma has emerged as the second-largest, supported by Aave's expansion beyond Ethereum. Solana's growth has largely been driven by native lending platform Kamino, the report says. Deposits concentrate on Aave and Morpho, with Kamino close behind.

The activity has yet to reach venue revenues. Application revenues fell across both lending and trading platforms over the year, in what the report calls an early stage of adoption. Hyperliquid is the exception, the report says, generating substantially more application revenue than any other trading or lending venue and overtaking Solana and Ethereum as the top revenue-generating chain. Decrypt reported in July that real-world assets had outpaced crypto on Hyperliquid for the first time in a single week, with chipmaker SK Hynix the most-traded stock.

The split is not new. In February, tokenized real-world assets grew 8.7% in a month to $24.8 billion, while DeFi's total value locked fell 25% to $94.8 billion. 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz attributed the rotation to compressed DeFi yields against about 4% on tokenized Treasuries. BlackRock, whose BUIDL fund is named in the report, launched two more tokenized money market funds on Monday, then added tokenized share classes for European money market funds holding a combined $311 billion.

Scale remains modest. About $2.2 billion of a global equity market worth more than $100 trillion has been tokenized, a position the report likens to stablecoins in 2019. The analysis covers only distributed assets, those that can be moved to wallets outside the issuing platform. Networks such as Canton and Provenance sit outside its scope.