Tokenized assets are busier than the data shows

Depending on who you ask, the share of tokenized real-world assets actually being used in DeFi is under 1%, or 7%, or 11.7%, or close to 20%. Every one of those numbers was published this year. Every one of them is defensible. None of them measures the same thing.

The low one gets most of the airtime: of the roughly $51 billion in tokenized real-world assets on public blockchains, this estimate suggests only a single-digit percentage actually does anything. It gets repeated as proof that onchain finance is still a toy. All this tokenized “value,” and almost none of it working, at least publicly.

The critique isn’t baseless. An asset that moves onchain, pays fees to get there, and gains no productivity in return is a worse product than the one it copied. But the number being used to prove that critique is close to meaningless. And not because it’s too low. It’s that both halves of the fraction are theater.

Where the numbers come from

The sub-1% figure measures three tokenized money market funds, not a market: BlackRock’s BUIDL, Circle’s USYC and Franklin Templeton’s iBENJI hold $7.2 billion between them and have roughly $50 million deployed. Widen the basket, and it becomes 11.7% on DeFiLlama’s data, or about 19% using CoinShares’ $7.4 billion Q2 count against RWA.xyz’s $38 billion total — same market, same quarter, a 20x spread, because nobody has agreed what the question is.

The denominator was never going to move

According to Bernstein’s research, about 47% of the $51 billion in tokenized real-world assets onchain is private credit. Private credit doesn’t move much in traditional finance either; tokenizing it changes neither its redemption calendar nor its holder base. Counting it in the denominator of a composability metric is a category error, not a disappointment.