The $30 billion RWA tokenization boom is barely reaching DeFi

A notable development has hit the crypto markets. DefiLlama’s RWA category data puts the RWA tokenization market near $30 billion on-chain, with only $2. 47 billion appearing as DeFi active TVL, the value actually deposited or pooled inside third-party DeFi protocols the platform tracks. The rest of the tokenized real-world assets market sits outside the lending markets and collateral vaults that make crypto assets composable.

Bond and money market funds are the largest single RWA category at over $16. 6 billion on-chain, yet they carry only $920 million in DeFi active total value locked (TVL). Gold and commodities sit at $5.

Market Dynamics

7 billion on-chain against $183. 6 million in DeFi, while stocks and equities contribute $2. 7 billion on-chain against $78.

Private credit stands apart with $3. 226 billion on-chain and $1. 257 billion in DeFi active TVL, a 39% ratio, driven by protocols like Maple Finance and Centrifuge that built their products as lending instruments from inception.

Issuers built categories such as Treasury funds, gold, and equities for institutional holding and regulated fund architecture. A log-scale bar chart comparing onchain market cap to DeFi active TVL across four RWA categories, with private credit at 39% DeFi utilization. Permissioned architecture limits DeFi composability DefiLlama classifies BlackRock's money market fund, BUIDL, as permissioned and records only $18.

Market Impact

9 million in DeFi active TVL for the fund. IOSCO's November 2025 final report on financial asset tokenization noted that BUIDL created a permissioned system on public blockchains for issuance, custody, secondary trading between allowlisted qualified investors, dividend distribution, and redemption. Prospective holders must clear a Securitize-managed allowlist, and on-chain transactions carry no legal effect until a transfer agent reconciles them with the off-chain record.

That makes BUIDL a compliance infrastructure that runs on blockchain rails for institutional holding and transfer-agent reconciliation. The fact that the fund's contracts interact only with allowlisted addresses prevents direct deposit into open protocols like Aave or Uniswap without a compliant wrapper in between. BlackRock's February 2026 Uniswap integration moved a portion of BUIDL onto the platform.

Still, Securitize controls the list of eligible institutions and market makers, and access stays restricted to qualified purchasers with at least $5 million in assets. IOSCO found that secondary trading of tokenized money market funds (MMFs) generally operates this way and concluded that the sector has yet to deliver the promised secondary-market liquidity benefits. RedStone's March 2026 tokenization report identified that the hardest part of tokenization is handling compliance, identity, transfer restrictions, sanctions, and corporate actions across jurisdictions and chains.

Crypto markets are watching this development closely as investors weigh its potential impact on prices.