The real-world asset (RWA) sector has seen rapid growth over the past three years, increasing in valuation by 58 times.
Recent data from DeFiLlama shows that total value locked (TVL) is now at an all-time high of $8.217 billion, peaking at $1 billion in the last seven days alone.
Major players driving growth
Industry leaders such as stablecoin issuer Usual and decentralized finance (DeFi) investment management platform Hashnote are at the forefront of this explosive growth.
Figures from DeFiLlama indicate that Hashnote saw a weekly increase of 65.58%, while Usual recorded slightly higher growth of 65.65%. The former has a TVL of $1.497 billion, while the latter has increased to $1.445 billion.
In 30 days, Usual’s metric increased 230%, while Hashnote’s kept pace with 217%. Together these two contributed to over 35% of the value of assets captured in the RWA sector.
Usual’s strong performance is due to raising $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Binance Labs and Kraken Ventures. It also recently saw the price of its governance token hit a new all-time high following claims that hackers had compromised the X account of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy and used it to launch a fake partnership between the US government. and the stablecoin project.
Outside of the top two, green candles were also seen on platforms such as Nest Staking, MatrixDock, Franklin Templeton and Ethena. Nest Staking saw a weekly increase of over 58%, bringing its total value to $66.24 million.
On the other hand, MatrixDock, which operates in two chains, rose 48.18%, while Ethena saw a more modest increase of 12.38%.
Others suffer losses
Not all protocols experienced uniform growth, with DeFiLlama data showing that Solv Protocol, DigiFT, Danogo, KlimaDAO and Fortunafi experienced varying degrees of decline.
The biggest seven-day loss was suffered by Danogo, whose TVL of $4 million is down more than 15% from a week ago.
Among the higher-cap projects, Solv lost the most locked-in value, losing more than 10% to settle at $712.81 million. However, over 30 days, Maker RWA experienced the largest decline, with a negative change of 65%, reducing the value of assets under custody to $290.7 million.
The jump in RWA tokenization could signal a shift in the way traditional assets are managed, traded and accessed. Recently, several players in Argentina’s lithium mining sector announced plans to tokenize the potentially trillion-dollar industry with the help of Cardano. Financial giants, including BlackRock, have also helped legitimize the space through their BUIDL initiative.
