Real-World Asset Tokenization Exceeds $25 Billion, But Most Funds Remain Idle

The total market capitalization of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) has surpassed $25 billion, but its liquidity efficiency is far from expected. While growth in this area is mainly driven by U.S. Treasury bonds and commodities, accounting for 58% of overall growth, the proportion of Treasury bonds in the RWA market is gradually declining, from 59% to 43%. At the same time, the tokenization scale of equity assets and gold is rapidly expanding, becoming a new growth engine. Among them, the supply of tokenized gold has almost doubled during the same period, from 687,000 troy ounces to 1.3 million troy ounces, reflecting the market's increasing demand for the digitization of physical assets.

However, a key issue emerges: a large number of tokenized assets are not truly participating in financial activities. According to data tracked by Nexus Data, the total supply of stablecoins currently backed by RWAs is $8.5 billion, but only about $1 billion (11.8%) is actually deployed to decentralized finance (DeFi News) protocols. The remaining funds are mostly held by institutional investors, limited by the compliance design of the tokens themselves—such as KYC/AML restrictions—and cannot freely access the open DeFi News ecosystem.

This phenomenon reveals the core contradiction of institutional-grade RWA implementation: although assets have been put on the blockchain, they have lost their financial composability due to structural isolation. They are more like static records in a digital ledger than financial infrastructure that dynamically participates in value circulation. The real breakthrough may not lie in the expansion of scale, but in how to rebuild the composability of assets within a compliant framework.