From April to June 2026, the volume of RWA on lending platforms and decentralized exchanges reached $7.4 billion, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier. The figures come from a joint report by CoinShares and Token Terminal.
Over the past 365 days, real-world assets (RWAs) have moved beyond tokenisation into increasingly active onchain markets.
Together with @tokenterminal, we look at the growth of Hybrid Finance across deposits, trading and derivatives, and what could define its next phase.… pic.twitter.com/D8kEvM1A6j
— CoinShares (@CoinSharesCo) August 6, 2026
Over the same period, aggregate deposits in DeFi fell by roughly 15%. CoinShares CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti said the divergence points to demand driven by the financial utility of assets, not just the market cycle.
The estimates are based on Token Terminal data primarily covering Q2 2025 to Q2 2026. The latest chart values are as of July 20.
Yield-bearing assets have become the main collateral
By the end of Q2, RWAs accounted for about 6% of all deposits in DeFi, up from roughly 1.7% a year earlier.
The main contributors were tokenized treasury and investment funds JTRSY and BUIDL, yield-bearing token sUSDS, private credit products JAAA, syrupUSDT, syrupUSDC and PRIME, as well as the delta-neutral strategy sUSDe.
The authors attributed demand to the ability to keep earning yield from an asset even after it is pledged as collateral. This reduces opportunity costs compared with non-yielding collateral.
Nearly 70% of RWA deposits are on lending platforms on Ethereum. Plasma ranks second thanks to the deployment of Aave, and the increase in Solana was attributed to the Kamino protocol.
The report’s methodology uses an expanded sample. Alongside tokenized funds, equities and commodities, it includes yield-bearing “stablecoins” and strategies whose returns depend on the crypto market.
This means the rise to $7.4 billion cannot be fully attributed to moving traditional financial instruments onto a blockchain. Part of the figure reflects products created within the crypto industry.
RWA spot trading rose 220%
Spot trading volumes of RWAs on decentralized exchanges increased by roughly 220% year over year. Aggregate DEX spot turnover over the same period fell by about 70%.
The growth came from a small base. According to the report’s chart, in Q2 2026 RWA trading volume was about $6.3 billion, or less than 2% of total DEX spot turnover.
Most activity centered on tokenized gold XAUT and PAXG, as well as yield-bearing token sUSDe. The share of tokenized equities began to increase but remained below that of funds and commodities.
Most spot activity is concentrated on Ethereum and Solana. Arbitrum, BNB Chain and Base have yet to generate comparable trading volumes.
Activity grew faster in the perpetual futures market. According to the report, in Q2 the turnover of such contracts on traditional assets exceeded $200 billion and approached 32% of aggregate volume.
Trading volume on the RWA venue tradeXYZ in the Hyperliquid ecosystem increased roughly 20x since launch. The most in-demand underlying assets were oil, precious metals, stock indices, and shares of technology and semiconductor companies.
Growth has not yet changed DeFi economics
Revenues at lending and trading DeFi applications declined between Q2 2025 and the same period in 2026. RWA activity has not yet offset the drop in crypto trading and lending.
Hyperliquid remained the largest by revenue among the applications reviewed. The authors linked its position to high trading activity and to the fact that the platform earns revenue both from the exchange and from its own settlement infrastructure.
Yields across the products reviewed ranged from roughly 3.2% to 5.5%. Tokenized treasury funds were at the lower end, while private credit, onchain loans and funding-rate strategies offered higher figures.
The authors assessed user profiles by average wallet balance. Holders of the institutional fund BUIDL had balances in the tens of millions of dollars, while owners of tokenized equities xStocks held significantly smaller amounts.
One wallet does not necessarily correspond to one investor. An address may belong to an exchange, a custodian, a smart contract, or a single owner of multiple wallets, so this metric can only serve as an approximate guide.
CoinShares estimates the market capitalization of tokenized equities at roughly $2.2 billion, compared with more than $100 trillion for the global stock market. Analysts compared the segment’s current stage with stablecoins in 2019.
In July, RWAs for the first time accounted for more than half of weekly trading volume on Hyperliquid. Over seven days, turnover for such instruments reached $25.1 billion.
Earlier, Bernstein analysts concluded that the aggregate value of tokenized assets rose 40% since the start of the year to $51 billion.
