DefiLlama’s RWA category data places the RWA tokenization market at nearly $30 billion on-chain, with only $2.47 billion showing up as DeFi active TVL, the value actually deposited or pooled into third-party DeFi protocols the platform tracks.
The rest of the tokenized real-world asset market exists outside the credit markets and collateral vaults that make crypto assets composable. Bond and money market funds are the largest single RWA category with over $16.6 billion on-chain, yet they only have $920 million in DeFi Active Total Value Locked (TVL).
Gold and commodities contribute $5.7 billion on-chain, versus $183.6 million in DeFi, while stocks and shares contribute $2.7 billion on-chain, versus $78.27 million in DeFi.
Private credit stands out with $3.226 billion on-chain and $1.257 billion in DeFi active TVL, a ratio of 39%, driven by protocols like Maple Finance and Centrifuge that built their products as lending instruments from the ground up.
Issuers created categories such as treasury funds, gold and equities for institutional holdings and regulated fund architecture.
Permissioned architecture limits the ability to compose DeFi
DefiLlama classifies BlackRock’s money market fund, BUIDL, as permitted, recording only $18.9 million in DeFi active TVL for the fund.
IOSCOs November 2025 final report on Tokenization of Financial Assets noted that BUIDL has created an authorized system on public blockchains for issuance, custody, secondary trading between qualified eligible investors, dividend distribution and redemption.
Potential holders must complete an eligibility list managed by Securitize, and on-chain transactions have no legal effect until a transfer agent reconciles them with the off-chain data.
This makes BUIDL a compliance infrastructure that runs on blockchain rails for the coordination of institutional holding companies and transfer agents. The fact that the fund’s contracts only communicate with addresses on the allowlist prevents direct deposit into open protocols like Aave or Uniswap without a compatible wrapper in between.
BlackRock’s Uniswap integration in February 2026 moved part of BUIDL to the platform. Still, Securitize controls the list of eligible institutions and market makers, and access remains limited to qualified buyers with at least $5 million in assets.
IOSCO found that secondary trading in tokenized money market funds (MMFs) generally works this way and concluded that the sector has not yet delivered on the promised liquidity benefits in the secondary market.
RedStone’s March 2026 tokenization report shows that the most difficult part of tokenization is dealing with compliance, identity, transfer restrictions, sanctions, and corporate actions across jurisdictions and chains. That makes Morpho and Aave Horizon the clearest RWA DeFi examples in the current dataset.
Every additional compliance restriction a platform builds in makes it more difficult to integrate the asset into DeFi, and issuers of tokenized Treasuries, Treasury funds, and MMFs have these restrictions built in by design to meet their regulated investor base.
The gold and commodities category adds a third dimension to the stack, as data from CoinGecko showed that spot volume of tokenized gold reached $90.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, surpassing full-year 2025. Yet centralized exchanges are responsible for the vast majority of spot trading in tokenized assets.
The DeFi active TVL figure of $183.6 million for the category reflects activity concentrated in centralized locations, which is completely outside of DefiLlama’s DeFi protocol tracking.
Where the bull business lives
Ondos $USDY surpassed $1 billion in TVL in early 2026 and is active in nine blockchains. Ondo Global Markets, which launched in September 2025 to offer tokenized US stocks and ETFs to non-US investors, built its tokens for free transferability and acceptance of DeFi collateral, reaching $650 million in TVL and over $12 billion in cumulative trading volume.
RedStone’s report counts over $620 million in RWA deposits on Morpho and $423.5 million in total market size on Aave Horizon, two lending protocols that have turned RWA collateral into a functional product.
These products demonstrate that composability is achievable at the release level when designers build for permissionless circulation from the ground up.
DWF Labs’ April 2026 roundtable with participants from Centrifuge, Falcon Finance and xStocks concluded that the RWA market is splitting in two directions: one for proprietary, authorized rails, and another for customizable-first designs that combine compliant issuance with secondary market usability.
Centrifuge’s Graham Nelson said strict eligibility lists prevent assets from ending up in open pools when each pool participant needs to be brought on board individually.
Centrifuge’s DeRWA approach addresses this by combining compliant primary issuance with freer secondary transferability. Falcon Finance’s Artem Tolkachev called composability and exit mechanisms the bridges between real-world assets and crypto liquidity.
The bull case is that enough market moves in this direction to push the DeFi active ratio meaningfully above 9% as the total on-chain RWA market approaches $50 billion.
The bear case, in the data
Standard Chartered expects $2 trillion in tokenized assets by 2028, but warns the boom could consolidate within banking infrastructure, with open markets accounting for little of the growth.
IOSCO’s November 2025 report found that tokenized assets are still largely dependent on conventional financial infrastructure for distribution and secondary trading due to accessibility and liquidity constraints on DLT platforms.
The ECB noted in its April 2026 tokenization review that the lack of common standards could entrench tokenized markets as isolated pools, each with its own compliance framework, settlement layer and access model, concentrating liquidity within closed networks.
Bond and MMF funds at 5.5%, gold and commodities at 3.2%, and stocks and shares at 2.9% indicate this structural separation.
Most tokenized Treasury and MMF products have minimum investment thresholds, KYC requirements, transfer agent reconciliation cycles, and NAV-aligned redemption windows that are structurally incompatible with real-time AMM pricing or permissionless collateral vaults.
Regulators required these features, and issuers accepted them.
Two markets, one scoreboard
The $30 billion figure and the $2.47 billion DeFi active TVL figure measure two different markets that the industry groups have under the same RWA label.
One of these concerns regulated chain finance, consisting of money market funds, treasury funds, custodial rails and issuer-managed data reconciled by transfer agents. The other is DeFi composability, consisting of assets deposited in lending protocols, used as collateral without permission, and integrated into automated return strategies.
Morpho’s $620 million in RWA deposits and $USDYThe footprint of nine chains shows that the second market has real traction.
For the DeFi active ratio to exceed 9%, issuers should choose a structure that allows permission-free circulation by design instead of the BUIDL architecture, where the compliance structure is the product.
With most of the current $28.56 billion in on-chain market capitalization in the permitted camp, tokenized assets still look more like regulated on-chain financing than open DeFi collateral.