Tokenized Asset Deposits Tripled to $7.4B as DeFi Shrank: CoinShares

Deposits of tokenized real-world assets into decentralized lending platforms and exchanges more than tripled over the past year, climbing from $2.3 billion to $7.4 billion, while total deposits across DeFi fell by approximately 15%.

The figures come from The Growth of Hybrid Finance, published Thursday by asset manager CoinShares and on-chain data provider Token Terminal. It is the pair’s second joint report, covering the second quarter of 2025 through the second quarter of 2026, with all data supplied by Token Terminal.

The same divergence runs through three markets. Aggregate spot volumes on decentralized exchanges declined by around 70% over the period, while volumes in tokenized real-world assets rose by roughly 220%. On perpetual futures venues, both trading volumes and open interest in RWAs kept climbing through a broader slowdown that began in October 2025, and RWA positions now make up more than a quarter of on-chain perpetuals open interest.

Tokenized Treasury and multi-strategy funds including JTRSY, BUIDL and sUSDS account for the largest share, followed by private credit products such as JAAA, syrupUSDC and PRIME, and delta-neutral strategies like sUSDe. Tokenized gold leads spot trading volume. Perpetuals activity concentrates in oil and precious metals, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, and technology and semiconductor stocks.

“Investors are not leaving traditional finance behind,” CoinShares co-founder and CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti argued in a statement. “Look at what is actually being used on-chain,” he added. “Treasuries, gold, the S&P 500, semiconductor stocks. Not one of them is a crypto asset.”

Ethereum’s share of the collateral

Almost 70% of RWA deposits sit on lending venues built on Ethereum. Plasma has emerged as the second-largest, supported by Aave’s expansion beyond Ethereum, while Solana‘s growth has “largely been driven” by native RWA lending platform Kamino. Deposits stay concentrated on Aave, Morpho and Kamino.

That activity has yet to reach venue revenues. Application revenues fell across both lending and trading platforms over the year, in what the report calls an early stage of adoption. Hyperliquid is the exception, generating “substantially more application revenue” than any other trading or lending venue and overtaking Solana and Ethereum as the top revenue-generating chain. Decrypt reported in July that real-world assets had outpaced crypto on Hyperliquid for the first time in a single week, with chipmaker SK Hynix the most-traded stock.

The split is not new. In February, tokenized real-world assets had grown 8.7% in a month to $24.8 billion as DeFi’s total value locked fell 25% to $94.8 billion, a rotation 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz put down to compressed DeFi yields against about 4% on tokenized Treasuries. BlackRock, whose BUIDL fund is among those named in the report, launched two more tokenized money market funds on Monday, swiftly followed by the launch of tokenized share classes for European money market funds holding a combined $311 billion.

Scale remains modest. Around $2.2 billion of a global equity market worth more than $100 trillion has been tokenized, a position the report likens to stablecoins in 2019. The analysis covers distributed assets only—those that can be moved to wallets outside the issuing platform—placing networks such as Canton and Provenance outside its scope.