Deposits of tokenized real-world assets into decentralized lending platforms and exchanges more than tripled over the year ending Q2 2026, climbing from $2.3 billion to $7.4 billion, even as total DeFi deposits fell roughly 15% across the same period, according to a joint report by asset manager CoinShares and on-chain data provider Token Terminal.
The report, titled ‘The Growth of Hybrid Finance,’ is the second collaboration between the two firms and covers the second quarter of 2025 through the second quarter of 2026.
A Tale of Two Markets
The divergence is stark across all three market segments the report examines. Aggregate spot volumes on decentralized exchanges fell approximately 70% over the period, while tokenized RWA spot trading volumes rose by roughly 220%. On perpetual futures venues, both trading volumes and open interest in RWA positions continued climbing through a broader slowdown that began in October 2025. RWA positions now account for more than a quarter of all on-chain perpetuals open interest.
The biggest deposited products are tokenized Treasury and multi-strategy funds, including JTRSY, BUIDL, and sUSDS. Private credit products such as JAAA, syrupUSDC, and PRIME rank second, followed by delta-neutral strategies like sUSDe. Tokenized gold leads spot trading volume, while perpetuals activity is concentrated in oil, precious metals, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100, and technology and semiconductor stocks.
Ethereum Dominates Collateral, Hyperliquid Leads Revenue
Nearly 70% of all RWA deposits sit on lending venues built on Ethereum. Plasma has emerged as the second-largest platform, supported by Aave’s expansion beyond Ethereum. Solana’s growth has ‘largely been driven’ by native RWA lending platform Kamino, the report says. Deposits remain concentrated across Aave, Morpho, and Kamino.
Despite the deposit growth, application revenues fell across both lending and trading platforms over the year, which the report characterises as an early stage of adoption. Hyperliquid is the notable exception: the report says it generated ‘substantially more application revenue’ than any other trading or lending venue, overtaking both Solana and Ethereum as the top revenue-generating chain. Earlier reporting noted that real-world assets outpaced crypto on Hyperliquid for the first time in a single week, with chipmaker SK Hynix the most-traded stock.
Traditional Assets Lead On-Chain Activity
‘Investors are not leaving traditional finance behind,’ CoinShares co-founder and CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti said in a statement. ‘Look at what is actually being used on-chain. Treasuries, gold, the S&P 500, semiconductor stocks. Not one of them is a crypto asset.’
The scale of tokenization remains limited in absolute terms. Around $2.2 billion of a global equity market worth more than $100 trillion has been tokenized, a penetration the report compares to where stablecoins stood in 2019. The analysis covers only distributed assets, meaning those that can be moved to wallets outside the issuing platform, which places networks such as Canton and Provenance outside its scope.
BlackRock, whose BUIDL fund is among those named in the report, launched two additional tokenized money market funds earlier this week. The firm also launched tokenized share classes for European money market funds holding a combined $311 billion. In February, tokenized RWAs had grown 8.7% in a single month to $24.8 billion as DeFi’s total value locked dropped 25% to $94.8 billion, a rotation 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz attributed to compressed DeFi yields set against roughly 4% returns on tokenized Treasuries.
