RWA热潮为何难以惠及DeFi？
- Core Insight: The scale of tokenized Real World Assets (RWA) on-chain is nearly $30 billion, yet only $2.47 billion (approximately 9%) truly flows into the DeFi ecosystem, revealing a significant disconnect. The compliance constraints of permissioned architectures represent the biggest barrier, while high-adaptation products have proven that composability is key to unlocking potential.
- Key Elements:
- RWA penetration rates in DeFi across various categories are extremely low: Bond Money Market Funds ($0.92B / $16.6B), Gold Commodities ($0.18B / $5.7B), Stocks ($0.078B / $2.7B). Only the Private Credit sector, leveraging native DeFi designs, achieves a penetration rate of 39%.
- Permissioned funds like BlackRock's BUIDL restrict secondary interactions through mechanisms such as whitelists and off-chain verification, directly blocking composability with permissionless protocols like Aave and Uniswap, making this the biggest obstacle for DeFi composability.
- Examples of high penetration include Ondo USDY with over $1 billion locked and coverage across 9 public chains, as well as Morpho and Aave Horizon successfully implementing RWA-backed lending, proving the feasibility of balancing compliance with free circulation starting from the design phase.
- The industry diverges into two main directions: a strictly permissioned control route prioritizing compliance, and an open circulation route balancing compliance with ecosystem composability, the latter seen as key to bridging real-world assets with crypto markets.
- Central banks and regulators warn that the lack of unified standards leads to "asset silos," with liquidity concentrated in closed circles; most assets are subject to traditional rules like minimum investment amounts and identity verification, conflicting with DeFi's real-time pricing logic.
Original Author: Gino Matos
Original Translation: Chopper, Foresight News
Data from DeFiLlama shows that the total value of on-chain tokenized Real World Assets (RWA) is approaching $30 billion, but only $2.47 billion of that is reflected as DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL), representing the actual amount of capital deposited into third-party DeFi platforms and participating in ecosystem operations.
The vast majority of other RWA assets remain outside scenarios like lending markets and collateral vaults that enable the free combination and interaction of crypto assets. Bond and money market funds are the largest RWA category, with a total on-chain scale exceeding $16.6 billion, but only $920 million flows into the DeFi ecosystem as effective locked TVL. Gold and commodity classes have an on-chain scale of $5.7 billion, with only $183.6 million in effective DeFi circulation. Equity assets have an on-chain scale of $2.7 billion, with a mere $78.27 million entering the DeFi market.
Only the private credit track shines: with an on-chain scale of $3.226 billion and effective DeFi locked TVL of $1.257 billion, its ecosystem penetration rate reaches 39%. The reason is that projects like Maple Finance and Centrifuge were positioned as lending financial tools from the initial product design phase, naturally fitting DeFi application scenarios.
In contrast, tokenized products like Treasury bond funds, gold assets, and stock equities are designed by issuers from the outset to prioritize institutional custody needs, with overall structures aligning with traditional compliant fund operation models.
Distribution of on-chain market cap vs. DeFi active TVL across four RWA categories
Permissioned Architectures Become the Biggest Barrier to DeFi Composability
DeFiLlama classifies BlackRock's money market fund product BUIDL as a permissioned fund, with an effective locked TVL within the DeFi ecosystem of only $18.9 million.
The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), in its November 2025 final report on financial asset tokenization, pointed out that BUIDL creates a permission system on a public blockchain for issuance, custody, secondary trading among qualified investors, dividend distribution, and redemptions.
Potential investors must pass the whitelist review on the Securitize platform, and the transfer of on-chain assets only gains full legal effect after information verification is confirmed by off-line transfer registration agencies.
This essentially means BUIDL is a compliant custody infrastructure built on the underlying channel of the blockchain, core to serving institutional asset custody and off-line account reconciliation needs. Its smart contract only supports interactions from whitelisted addresses. Without a compliant wrapper layer acting as an intermediary, it cannot be directly deposited into open-access DeFi protocols like Aave or Uniswap.
In February 2026, BlackRock completed an ecosystem integration between BUIDL and Uniswap, allowing some assets to enter the liquidity pools. However, asset access rights remain controlled by Securitize, limited to qualified institutional investors with net assets of no less than $5 million, leaving ordinary market participants unable to participate.
IOSCO found that the vast majority of tokenized money market funds currently on the market operate under a similar model, and these assets have yet to deliver the high secondary market liquidity value previously anticipated by the industry.
In its March 2026 tokenization industry report, RedStone stated bluntly that the most difficult part of asset tokenization implementation is coordinating a series of complex rules across different jurisdictions and public chain ecosystems, including compliance audits, identity verification, trading permission restrictions, sanctions screening, and corporate权益 distribution. Looking at the current market, Morpho and Aave Horizon are among the few typical cases that have truly enabled RWA assets within DeFi applications.
In short, every compliance access restriction set by project parties raises the barrier for assets to enter the DeFi ecosystem. Products like Treasury bond tokens and money market funds are inherently designed with various permission constraints to meet the regulatory requirements of licensed institutional investors.
Gold and commodity assets face another layer of practical issues. According to CoinGecko, on-chain spot trading volume for tokenized gold in Q1 2026 reached $90.7 billion, surpassing the total for all of 2025. However, the vast majority of this trading occurred on centralized exchanges. The previously mentioned $183.6 million in effective DeFi locked TVL represents only a tiny fraction of the volume circulating within the ecosystem; the massive trading volume on centralized markets is entirely outside DeFiLlama's statistical scope.
Bullish Expectation: High-Adaptability Products Have Pioneered Success
In early 2026, Ondo's USDY locked TVL exceeded $1 billion, achieving full coverage across nine major public chains. Ondo's Global Market segment, launched in September 2025, focuses on tokenized US stocks and ETF assets for overseas investors. From its inception, it was designed to support free asset transfers and direct use as DeFi collateral. Currently, its locked TVL stands at $650 million, with cumulative trading volume exceeding $12 billion.
According to RedStone, RWA asset deposits on the Morpho platform exceed $620 million, while the total scale of related assets on Aave Horizon reaches $423.5 million. Both lending protocols have successfully implemented mature application models for RWA collateralized lending.
These real-world cases fully prove: as long as the asset issuance stage adheres to the design principle of permissionless free circulation, RWA assets can fully achieve composability within the DeFi ecosystem.
During an industry roundtable in April 2026, DWF Labs, together with projects like Centrifuge, Falcon Finance, and xStocks, proposed the viewpoint that the RWA track has now split into two major development paths: one prioritizing asset ownership compliance by following a strict permission-controlled route; the other balancing compliant issuance standards while unlocking secondary market circulation properties, with ecosystem composability as the core design principle.
Centrifuge project lead Graham Nelson stated that a stringent whitelist access mechanism means each pool participant needs individual qualification verification, directly blocking the path for assets to enter open DeFi.
Centrifuge's DeRWA solution breaks down these barriers by compliantly wrapping underlying primary issuance assets while relaxing restrictions on asset transfers in the secondary market. Artem Tolkachev of Falcon Finance also noted that ecosystem composability and flexible exit mechanisms are precisely the key bridges connecting real-world assets with crypto market liquidity.
The industry optimistically believes that as the total on-chain RWA asset scale approaches $50 billion, if the majority of projects within the track shift towards DeFi-compatible design philosophies, the penetration rate of RWA assets within the DeFi ecosystem has the potential to break through the current low level of 9%.
Bearish Reality: Industry Growth May Be Trapped in Traditional Finance
Standard Chartered predicts that the global scale of tokenized assets will reach $2 trillion by 2028, but also warns that this industry boom will likely remain confined within the traditional banking and financial system, with the open crypto market capturing very limited growth dividends.
IOSCO's November 2025 survey corroborated this. Due to the inherent access barriers and liquidity shortcomings of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), the distribution, circulation, and secondary market trading of tokenized assets still heavily rely on traditional financial infrastructure.
The European Central Bank, in its April 2026 tokenization industry research report, further pointed out that a globally unified standard for asset tokenization does not yet exist, making it easy to create a series of mutually isolated asset silos. Different asset systems have their own compliance rules, settlement infrastructures, and access mechanisms, ultimately leading to liquidity being highly concentrated within closed circles and difficult to transfer between them.
The DeFi penetration rates of 5.5% for bonds and money funds, 3.2% for gold and commodities, and 2.9% for equities starkly illustrate this fragmented ecosystem landscape.
The vast majority of Treasury bond tokens and money fund products on the market generally impose minimum investment thresholds, mandatory identity verification, off-line asset reconciliation cycles, and fixed redemption windows tied to asset net value. These underlying rules inherently conflict with the operational logic of decentralized exchanges offering real-time pricing and permissionless collateral vaults. These constraints are mandatory requirements from regulators and the inevitable choice for asset issuers to actively adapt to the compliant environment.
Two Markets, One Industry Label
The $30 billion total on-chain RWA scale and the $2.47 billion effective DeFi circulation scale, while seemingly belonging to the same RWA track, actually correspond to two completely separate markets:
- Compliant On-Chain Financial Market: Mainly comprising money market funds, Treasury bond funds, and institutionally custodied assets. Asset circulation relies on off-line transfer agencies for reconciliation and validation, strictly following traditional financial regulatory rules.
- DeFi Composable Ecosystem Market: Assets can be freely deposited into lending protocols, used as permissionless collateral, or integrated into various automated yield strategies for free circulation.
The image above predicts the implied value of DeFi active TVL under four scenarios within a $50 billion RWA market, ranging from 5% to 25%.
Morpho's over $620 million in RWA deposits and USDY's circulation across 9 blockchains sufficiently prove the real development potential of the second type of market.
To push the RWA asset DeFi penetration rate beyond 9%, asset issuers must abandon design philosophies centered on compliance systems, like BlackRock's BUIDL, and instead adopt underlying architectures that natively support permissionless free circulation.
Currently, $28.56 billion of on-chain RWA assets belong to the permission-controlled track. This means that current tokenized real-world assets are, overall, more akin to compliant on-chain traditional financial products than to universal collateral assets suitable for the open DeFi ecosystem.
