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Most Tokenized Cash Never Trades, Dune Finds

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Tokenized real-world assets totaled $34.5 billion on Aug. 31, up more than 140% over the year, according to After Issuance: Reading the Onchain RWA Market, a report onchain data provider Dune published on Wednesday. The report measures how much of that value is traded, lent against or held in liquidity pools, and compares those figures with the traditional markets the tokens reference.

Across cash equivalents, credit, commodities and equities, the answer depends on who can move the asset. Cash equivalents are the largest class at $17.8 billion and barely trade. Tokenized stocks are the smallest at $2.8 billion and account for nearly all onchain spot activity. Only 6.1% of tokenized RWA supply, or $2.11 billion, sat in lending protocols at the cutoff, and three-quarters of that was credit.

"That record shows tokenization is working where assets can move freely, and stalling where they can't," Arnaud Simeray, vice president of institutions at Dune, said in a statement. "Onchain equities have passed a million holders, while most tokenized money funds have never traded onchain."

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The report is built on the RWA dataset Dune launched in August, which tracks tokenized products alongside synthetic exposure on Hyperliquid perpetuals and Kalshi and Polymarket event contracts. It lands two weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission granted a five-year exemption for onchain trading of tokenized US-listed stock, which The Defiant tracked through its drafting.

Treasury Funds Sit Still

Cash equivalents are 52% of tokenized RWA supply and grew 133% over the year. Twelve products hold $11.6 billion and returned between 3.22% and 3.59% on a 90-day trailing basis, a 37-basis-point spread. Every one came in below the 3.71% 13-week bill available when the window opened on June 3, and Dune says fees account for most of the gap. Circle's 10% performance fee on USYC takes a 3.58% gross yield to 3.22% net. The Defiant reported on the shortfall on Monday.

Of 26 cash-equivalent products that marked their net asset value at least weekly through August, three traded onchain. The other 23 held $14.2 billion, or 86% of the measurable class. Cash equivalents accounted for $68 million of lending deposits, 0.4% of their supply.

Holder counts say little about distribution. BlackRock's BUIDL holds $2.82 billion across 93 addresses and USYC $2.76 billion across 28. One address holds 98% of USYC, 96% of thBILL, 95% of JTRSY and 78% of WTGXX. Midas's mTBILL shows 5,102 holders, and its top 10 addresses hold 99.1% of supply. Dune notes that an address is an account, and one custodian can stand in for many investors.

The products sit at the short end of the curve. T-bill and money-market products account for more than 95% of tokenized Treasury exposure, while the 30-year bond paid 5.25% on Aug. 31. Dune concludes the segment "offers little insight into broader macro views on rates."

Credit Carries The Collateral

Tokenized credit reached $7.8 billion, up 111%, and realized yields ranged from 3.32% to 13.84%. Private-credit lines are 75% of the class, and private credit alone spans roughly 4% to 8%. At the top, Re Protocol's reinsurance-linked paper yielded 13.84%, Plume Arc's Brazilian receivables vault 12.27% and a Midas feeder into a credit fund 11.42%.

Credit is the class DeFi lends against. Credit accounted for $1.61 billion of lending deposits, 76% of the total and 21% of the class, by protocols' own records. Measured from token holder labels, the share is 19.1%. Every other class is at 2% or less. Morpho holds roughly $1 billion of all RWA deposits, and Morpho, Kamino and Aave excluding Horizon hold 83%.

Four products open without allowlists, Maple's syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT, Hastra's PRIME and Huma's PST, hold $2.68 billion and generate most of the class's secondary activity. Roughly $3 billion in products requiring KYC or issuer approval recorded little to no holder-to-holder transfers over 90 days.

About 32% of tokenized credit, or $2.45 billion, involves crypto counterparties or collateral, most of it Maple's $2.19 billion. Dune says much of that resembles repo more than lending to the real economy. Private credit peaked at $5.85 billion in March and fell to $4.67 billion, mostly after Maple's pools halved on more than $800 million of redemptions over 72 hours following the KelpDAO bridge exploit in April.

Securitized products rose from 9.5% to 21.9% of the class as Janus Henderson's Anemoy AAA CLO fund reached $909 million and Securitize's STAC $355.8 million. Resolv has capacity for up to $100 million of Anemoy as collateral on Aave Horizon, a strategy it launched in February.

Onchain Investors Pick Single Names

Tokenized equity supply rose 2,393% over the year and holders 2,454%, to more than 1 million. August spot volume was $12.6 billion and equity perpetual volume $72.4 billion, 84% of all RWA perpetual volume on Hyperliquid. Ondo Global Markets is the largest issuer at $936 million, followed by Binance's bStocks at $645 million.

One token inflates the spot figure. QQQB, a bStocks token tracking Invesco's QQQ, traded $7.9 billion on $31.2 million of supply after Binance listed it on June 30 with zero maker fees and, from July 23, counted its traded value at three times face toward VIP tiers. Excluding it, equities still account for 83% of DEX spot volume.

Single names are 81% of tokenized spot supply and 73% of perpetual open interest. Fund supply tripled from $186 million to $552 million since September 2025 while single-name supply rose ninefold to $2.28 billion, cutting the fund share from 42% to 19%. Goldman Sachs counts more than 6,000 US-listed ETFs, more than the number of listed US stocks, according to the report.

Perpetuals carry the Asian exposure. Asian names are 24% of equity open interest against 3% of spot supply, and memory and storage alone hold $524 million of open interest and generated $34 billion, or 47%, of August equity perpetual volume, led by SK Hynix, SanDisk and Micron.

The SK Hynix Seoul contract traded $11.6 billion in August, against $2.6 billion for the Nasdaq ADS contract. The US ADS reached a 40% premium to the Seoul share the week of Aug. 10, and the Korea Securities Depository's 2.5% cap on converting Seoul shares into ADS was fully used, according to the report. The perpetual gave traders the Seoul line without that cap. Funding topped 100% annualized on eight days in July and peaked at 308% on July 30. By late August it had turned negative and open interest fell from $343 million to $161 million.

"Because every position settles onchain, that shift toward individual companies is visible in the data," Armand Khatri, head of ecosystem at Ondo Finance, said in comments published in the report.

Gold Is Held, Oil Is Traded

Tokenized commodities reached $5.5 billion, up 138%, and gold is 97% of the class. Tether's XAUt at $3.2 billion and Paxos's PAXG at $1.9 billion hold 92% of supply. Across the four redeemable one-ounce products, ounces held rose 73% over the year against a 29% rise in the gold price, which Dune reads as new accumulation. Tokenized gold equals about 36 tonnes, 0.86% of the gold held in ETFs, and its $604 million of August DEX volume was 0.007% of global gold trading.

Oil runs the other way. Perpetuals carry 97.6% of onchain oil and gas exposure, with $4.3 million in tokenized spot. Crude was 60.5% of August commodity perpetual volume and turned over 46 times its open interest, against 14 for gold. Gold funding on Trade[XYZ] was positive on 88% of days. Crude funding averaged negative 12.4% from December to August and fell to negative 58% on the busiest days, which Dune says is consistent with hedging around oil price moves.

What The Numbers Cover

Dune's total excludes stablecoins and counts xStocks on circulating supply, since that issuer mints ahead of demand. Perpetual figures are Hyperliquid only, with open interest halved to one side. Yields are realized 90-day NAV returns. The report's cutoff is Aug. 31.

Other trackers count differently. RWA.xyz put distributed tokenized assets excluding stablecoins at $38.46 billion on Wednesday, down 1.56% over 30 days, with 4.88 million holders.

"The next twelve months are more informative than another increment in AUM," the report concludes.

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