Author: Jae, PANews

In the midsummer of July, RWA (Real World Assets) has become the hottest narrative in the crypto market, with on-chain scale reaching a historic high of $32 billion, an increase of about 22% since the beginning of the month, surpassing the previous high set in April this year.

While the industry is still celebrating the tokenization scale of RWA breaking $30 billion, a set of data on the utilization rates of DeFi has revealed its structural difficulties beneath the prosperous surface. Currently, nearly 90% of on-chain RWA are in an unused state, not participating in any lending, collateral or other DeFi activities.

The serious inversion of scale and activity is becoming an unavoidable practical proposition for the RWA sector: putting assets on-chain, then what?

A "scissor gap" exists between scale and utilization, with leading platforms showing differentiated performance

According to the report "The Real State of Tokenization in 2026," jointly released by BeInCrypto Intelligence and RWA.xyz, among the 1,289 tokenized assets over $100,000, 910 assets had no on-chain transfers in a week. This means that over 70% of tokenized assets are "asleep" most days.

Additionally, according to statistics from Edgy, a partner of the Bitcoin L2 protocol Stacks, the current total scale of the RWA market exceeds $30 billion, with 87% of assets in a "chain-sleep" state: neither entering the lending market as collateral nor forming effective circulation in trading venues, with most merely completing the first step of "accounting on-chain." A report from DWF Labs similarly indicates that only about 10% of tokenized RWA are genuinely active in DeFi protocols, while the remaining 90% are static capital "parked" in institutional wallets.

This divergence of "scale and utilization" is more evident among leading platforms.

Securitize: Scale champion, "underperformer" in utilization

As a distribution partner of the BlackRock BUIDL fund, Securitize is undoubtedly the "king of scale" in the RWA tokenization field. To date, its tokenized asset scale has exceeded $4.9 billion, with Q1 revenue reaching $19.5 million, and it has landed on the New York Stock Exchange with an estimated valuation of about $1.25 billion. However, its DeFi utilization rate is only about 0.7%, creating a stark contrast between its massive asset scale and extremely low DeFi usage rate.

Ondo Finance: Multi-chain expansion, utilization rate still sluggish

The protocol manages nearly $3.5 billion in tokenized assets, is deployed across more than 10 chains, and has 168 integrated projects, with a tokenized stock market share exceeding 70%. Ondo’s DeFi utilization rate is about 2.7%, which, though better than Securitize, still shows a significant gap from being truly "active."

Maple Finance: "Small scale" achieves "high efficiency"

Maple's scale is much smaller than Securitize and Ondo, with asset management totaling only $2.3 billion, but active loans have surpassed $1.6 billion, with cumulative loans over $22 billion, achieving a DeFi utilization rate of 62%.

From a business model perspective, there are essential differences among the three.

Securitize and Ondo play more of a "asset issuer" role. Their strengths lie in compliance structures and institutional relationships: obtaining licenses, signing up large clients, and putting assets on-chain; revenue comes from issuance and management fees. The circulation and use after tokenization is not a main business segment.

Maple, on the other hand, is an "asset application faction." It is an on-chain credit protocol whose assets are designed from the outset to embed in lending activities. Therefore, Maple can leverage a smaller asset scale to achieve a higher DeFi utilization rate, allowing assets to truly "turn" and generate on-chain economic value such as lending interest and transaction fees.

Why does "going on-chain" not equate to "circulation"?

The phenomenon of RWA "going on-chain and falling asleep" is a phased state resulting from the joint effects of asset attributes, compliance shackles, and a lack of infrastructure.

Asset attributes: Earning through holding ≠ trading circulation

Currently, the on-chain RWA sector is mainly divided between two major segments: the "active earning pool" dominated by private credit and the "earning safe haven" dominated by tokenized government bonds. They also show divergent trends in DeFi utilization rates.

The essence of private credit business is "funds lent out." In Maple's credit pool, the stablecoins deposited by investors are quickly lent by the protocol to qualified institutional borrowers, thereby pushing the DeFi utilization rate above 60%. This "deposit equals lending" model means that most of the TVL in private credit is equivalent to "unpaid loan balance."

In stark contrast, the DeFi utilization rate of tokenized government bonds is only about 5%. The value proposition of tokenized government bonds is "risk-free yield on-chain," rather than being a trading tool. Holders of products like BlackRock BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's BENJI are primarily institutions and stablecoin issuers, and their purpose in buying is to earn yield rather than frequent trading or leverage.

A large number of tokenized government bonds are used as underlying assets for stablecoins: Ethena’s USDtb holds approximately 90% of its reserves in BUIDL, while Frax’s frxUSD also lists BUIDL as one of its reserve assets. It can be said that tokenized government bonds are indeed playing a financial role, just not reflected in DeFi utilization rate indicators.

Compliance shackles: Whitelist mechanisms inherently limit circulation

The vast majority of tokenized assets are legally classified as securities and must comply with strict suitability regulations for investors. Products like Securitize's BUIDL and Ondo's OUSG are equipped with KYC whitelist mechanisms, whereby tokens can only be transferred between wallets of verified qualified investors.

This means that from the moment traditional assets go on-chain, there is a fundamental logical contradiction with "permissionless DeFi." They can be tokenized, but cannot freely enter public lending pools like Aave or Compound as collateral. Even for licensed markets like Aave Horizon, they can only cover a small portion of institutional users.

However, high scale and low utilization rate is an inevitable path for RWA to go mainstream. First, assets must be compliant and brought on-chain, establishing custody, auditing, and transfer agency lifecycle, and then conversations about composability can happen; this is the necessary order for institutional funds to enter. From this perspective, "asleep RWA" is not wastage, but instead is gathering strength for the next stage of development.

Lack of infrastructure: Market making and settlement mechanisms have yet to mature

DWF Labs managing partner Andrei Grachev points out that liquidity is a constraint for expanding RWA on-chain, with the absence of infrastructure to allow tokenized assets to be traded at scale: real-time pricing, instant redemption, and a secondary market deep enough for quotation.

As he said, the lack of liquidity infrastructure is indeed the third bottleneck facing RWA. Market makers generally adopt a wait-and-see attitude toward tokenized assets: thin trading volumes cannot cover market-making costs, the opacity of underlying asset valuations exacerbates holding risks, and compliance transfer restrictions further compress the range of trading counterparts.

Most RWA, due to low turnover, have bid-ask spreads far higher than traditional financial markets. In the absence of secondary market depth, investors face practical challenges of asset pricing and settlement even if they want to participate in DeFi transactions and lending.

From "issuance competition" to "application conflict," channels are consuming everything

The industry has become aware of the issue of low DeFi utilization rates for tokenized assets, and the focus of competition in the latter half of the RWA sector is gradually shifting from "who issues the most" to "who can use it effectively."

On one hand, native lending protocols naturally possess the advantage of high DeFi utilization. Protocols like Maple and Centrifuge have deeply bound assets to lending scenarios from their design inception, and their business models themselves drive asset circulation. Although these projects may be smaller in scale, they represent a direction of deep integration between RWA and DeFi.

On the other hand, the integration of distribution layers is becoming a new growth point. Securitize integrates UniswapX to facilitate compliant on-chain trading,

Centrifuge collaborates with Morpho to streamline lending distribution channels, and the gradual improvement of infrastructure is helping to bridge the last mile from issuance to use.

Moreover, players like Robinhood Crypto are gaining attention. For the vast majority of DeFi protocols, the toughest challenge after launching products is finding users and attracting liquidity. Robinhood Crypto has an existing application ecosystem (App), proprietary wallet (Wallet), and customer relationships, enabling assets to directly connect to existing users after issuance, resolving the "who to use after issuance" pain point faced by most platforms.

The yield token SyrupUSDG issued by Maple saw its circulating market cap soar to $100 million within a month after launching on Robinhood Crypto. In contrast, a similar product SyrupUSDT that was promoted independently by the protocol took a full 9 months to reach the same level. This shows that as RWA enters the stage of large-scale adoption, the dominance of channels, distribution networks, and user habits has far surpassed mere asset attributes.

The paradox of RWA utilization is essentially a reflection of the collision between traditional financial frameworks and crypto-native logic. The former emphasizes compliance, risk control, and holding returns, while the latter pursues composability, high turnover, and Lego-like innovation. The gap between the two is unlikely to be bridged in the short term by any single platform or technology.

The $32 billion scale proves the feasibility of "traditional assets going on-chain," but the low utilization rate also serves as a reminder to the industry: this is merely the first step in a long journey. The upcoming test lies not in how many assets can be recorded on the blockchain, but in how many assets can circulate, be used, and create new application scenarios on-chain.

For builders and investors, the next stage of selection criteria needs to be more diverse: not just looking at issuance scale, but also at liquidity depth; not just the length of the asset list, but also actual usage rates. Tokenization has never been the endpoint; truly bringing assets to life on-chain is the real starting point of the RWA narrative.

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