The decentralized finance market has faced a prolonged decline in activity. However, against this backdrop, the Real-World Assets (RWA) tokenization segment is demonstrating explosive growth, acting not just as a new narrative, but fundamentally changing the very economics of cryptocurrency collateral and attracting institutional capital.
The cryptocurrency market is undergoing a profound structural transformation. According to an extensive joint study by analysts at CoinShares and Token Terminal, covering the period from Q2 2025 to Q2 2026, the paradigm of capital utilization on the blockchain is undergoing cardinal changes. From April to June 2026, the volume of RWAs on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and lending platforms more than tripled, reaching an impressive mark of $7.4 billion (compared to $2.3 billion a year earlier).
The context in which this breakthrough is occurring is of greatest interest: it is unfolding against the backdrop of an obvious stagnation in the classic sector. Over the same period, the total volume of deposits in traditional DeFi protocols decreased by approximately 15%.
“Such a divergence between the overall DeFi decline and RWA growth clearly indicates that the current demand is driven by the real financial utility of these assets, and not just another phase of the speculative market cycle,” notes Jean-Marie Mognetti, CEO of CoinShares.
Paradigm Shift: Yield as the Main Magnet for Liquidity
By the end of the second quarter of 2026, the share of RWAs reached about 6% of all DeFi deposits, showing a multiple increase from 1.7% a year earlier. The key driver of this capital migration has been the concept of “working collateral” — assets that generate passive, predictable income.
The report’s authors highlight an important shift: investors are increasingly choosing RWAs as base collateral for obtaining loans. The reason is simple — it allows earning interest income on the collateral itself even after the asset is locked in a protocol’s smart contract. This drastically reduces opportunity costs compared to pledging traditional cryptocurrency, which does not generate a return on its own.
Key Growth Drivers (Segment Leaders):
- Tokenized Treasury and Investment Funds: Products like JTRSY and the BUIDL fund (by BlackRock).
- Private Credit Products: Tokens representing pools of loans (such as JAAA, syrupUSDT, syrupUSDC, PRIME).
- Innovative Strategies: The yield-bearing token sUSDS and the delta-neutral strategy sUSDe.
In terms of blockchain geography, Ethereum unconditionally dominates, accounting for almost 70% of all RWA deposits. It is confidently followed by the Plasma network (largely due to the successful deployment of the Aave lending protocol there), as well as Solana. Analysts directly link the growth of RWAs on the Solana network to the active use of the Kamino protocol.
(Extended Research Methodology: The report uses an extended interpretation of RWAs. The sample, in addition to classic assets, included yield-bearing stablecoins and strategies tied to the crypto market. Thus, the $7.4 billion figure cannot be entirely attributed to a transfer of liquidity from TradFi — a significant portion is generated by products created within the crypto industry itself).
The Trading Volume Paradox: The Gulf Between Spot and Derivatives
The decoupling trend is evident not only in deposits but also in trading metrics. While the total turnover on classic spot decentralized exchanges collapsed by 70% year-over-year, the volume of spot RWA trading soared by 220%.
However, this growth started from a very low base: in Q2 2026, the trading volume of spot RWAs was about $6.3 billion, which is still less than 2% of the total spot DEX turnover. In the spot market, conservative assets enjoyed the greatest popularity — tokenized gold (XAUT and PAXG) and the yield-bearing stablecoin sUSDe. The share of tokenized stocks has begun to grow but still lags behind commodities. The vast majority of spot liquidity is concentrated on Ethereum and Solana, while Arbitrum, BNB Chain, and Base cannot yet boast comparable trading volumes.
Explosive Growth in the Perpetual Futures Market A much more aggressive dynamic is observed in the derivatives market. The turnover of contracts tied to traditional assets exceeded $200 billion in Q2, approaching 32% of the total trading volume. For example, the tradeXYZ platform in the Hyperliquid ecosystem has shown a 20-fold increase in volumes since its launch. Investors most often chose oil, precious metals, indices, and stocks in the high-tech sector.
Sector Economics and Investor Profile
Despite the success of the RWA narrative, this trend has not yet been able to fundamentally fix the overall economics of DeFi. The revenues of lending and trading applications on an annualized basis still declined — the growth in RWA transactions is currently insufficient to compensate for the drop in cryptocurrency trading. The main exception was the Hyperliquid project, which retained the lead in revenue due to high activity and a model that accumulates income both from the exchange and from the infrastructure.
Yield and Demographics: Products offer investors from 3.2% (Treasury funds) to 5.5% per annum (private credit, on-chain loans). Researchers also identified demographic differences:
- Among holders of the institutional BUIDL fund, the average balance is measured in tens of millions of dollars.
- Investors in tokenized stocks (xStocks) hold significantly smaller amounts, forming a retail segment. (The wallet metric is indicative, as one address can belong to an exchange or one person with multiple addresses).
Looking Ahead
According to CoinShares, the capitalization of tokenized stocks is now approximately $2.2 billion. Considering that the volume of the global stock market exceeds $100 trillion, the potential for growth is colossal. Analysts compare the current stage of RWA development with the stablecoin market in 2019 — right before their exponential takeoff.
The first signs of this takeoff are already being recorded: in July 2026, RWA instruments provided more than half of the weekly trading volume on Hyperliquid for the first time, reaching a record $25.1 billion in seven days.
