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.

Then there's the trophy tier. The early flagships that generated the "RWAs are here" headlines BUIDL, Apollo's ACRED and others like them — shipped wrapped in enough transfer restrictions and whitelist gates that they couldn't function as collateral even if someone wanted them to. Someone involved in one of those products told me flatly that it was "a terrible product."

Three reasons utilization looks low, and only one is a failure

Restricted by design. Some assets genuinely cannot be used: whitelists, transfer agents, accreditation gates, no permissionless path to onchain lending markets. This is the failure everyone assumes is the whole story.

Parked by intent. Some assets can be used and simply aren't, because of who holds them and why. A foundation holding BUIDL on its balance sheet to get BlackRock to deploy on its chain is buying a headline, not a yield strategy. More broadly, BUIDL is what you buy when you want BlackRock's name on the position; its competitors, at a similar yield, only get minted when someone wants something BUIDL doesn't have — more DeFi composability, or more DeFi subsidies. So the challenger's holders are selected for wanting to use the thing. Comparing utilization across those two cohorts tells you why people bought, not what the token can do.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.