Real-world assets, or RWA, became one of crypto’s most closely watched themes in July, pushing on-chain value to a record $32 billion. That was about 22% higher than at the start of the month and above the previous peak reached in April.
But the jump in tokenization volume has exposed a structural problem. Much of the capital being brought on-chain is not actually being used in DeFi. According to the figures cited in the article, nearly 90% of on-chain RWA remains unused, with little participation in lending, collateralization, or other on-chain financial activity.
A widening gap between scale and activity
A joint report from BeInCrypto Intelligence and RWA.xyz, titled The Real State of Tokenization 2026, found that among 1,289 tokenized assets worth more than $100,000, 910 saw no on-chain transfer activity over a one-week period. In other words, more than 70% of those assets were effectively dormant.
Stacks partner Edgy separately estimated that the RWA market has already grown beyond $30 billion, but 87% of those assets remain in what he described as an on-chain dormant state. They have not entered lending markets as collateral, and they are not circulating in any meaningful way on trading venues. For many of them, tokenization has so far amounted to little more than putting the asset ledger on-chain.
DWF Labs reached a similar conclusion. Its report said only about 10% of tokenized RWA is actively deployed in DeFi protocols, while the other 90% remains parked in institutional wallets as static capital.
The disconnect between issuance scale and actual usage becomes even clearer when major platforms are compared side by side.
How the major platforms differ
Securitize: scale leader, weak DeFi usage
Securitize, the issuance partner for BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, stands at the top of the market by tokenized asset volume. Its platform has surpassed $4.9 billion in tokenized assets. The article also says the company posted $19.5 million in Q1 revenue and reached the New York Stock Exchange with an approximately $1.25 billion valuation.
Yet Securitize’s DeFi utilization rate is only about 0.7%. The contrast is sharp: large issuance, minimal on-chain financial use.
Ondo Finance: broad expansion, limited utilization
Ondo Finance manages nearly $3.5 billion in tokenized assets. It has expanded across more than 10 chains, built 168 integrations, and holds more than 70% market share in tokenized equities, according to the article.
Still, Ondo’s DeFi utilization rate is only around 2.7%. That is better than Securitize’s level, but it remains far from what would count as deeply active on-chain use.
Maple Finance: smaller base, much higher efficiency
Maple Finance is much smaller by assets under management, at $2.3 billion, but the protocol has more than $1.6 billion in active loans and more than $22 billion in cumulative loan originations. Its DeFi utilization rate stands at 62%.
The article ties those numbers to a difference in business model. Securitize and Ondo operate more like asset issuers. Their strength lies in licensing, compliance structure, and institutional relationships. They bring assets onto public rails and generate revenue through issuance and management fees. Secondary circulation and DeFi use are not the center of their business.
Maple takes a different approach. It is an on-chain credit protocol, and its assets are designed from the start to plug into lending activity. That lets Maple generate more on-chain use from a smaller asset base and turn tokenized capital into lending interest and transaction-related economic activity.
Why tokenization has not produced circulation
The article says the “tokenized but sleeping” pattern comes from three forces acting together: asset characteristics, compliance constraints, and missing infrastructure.
Asset characteristics matter
The on-chain RWA market is now largely split between two buckets: private credit, framed as an actively yielding pool, and tokenized Treasuries, positioned as an income-generating safe haven. Their DeFi utilization profiles are very different.
Private credit is built around lending by design. In Maple’s credit pools, stablecoins deposited by investors are quickly lent out to qualified institutional borrowers, which is why the protocol’s utilization can exceed 60%. In that structure, much of the total value locked is effectively the balance of outstanding loans.
Tokenized Treasuries look very different. Their DeFi utilization rate is only about 5%, according to the article. The value proposition is on-chain low-risk yield, not high-frequency trading. Products such as BlackRock’s BUIDL and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI are mainly held by institutions and stablecoin issuers that buy them to earn income rather than to trade actively or layer leverage on top.
The piece adds that tokenized Treasuries are already serving a financial function even if that does not show up in standard DeFi utilization metrics. Ethena’s USDtb holds about 90% of its reserves in BUIDL, and Frax’s frxUSD also uses BUIDL as one of its reserve assets.
Compliance limits transferability
Most tokenized assets are legally treated as securities, which means they must follow strict investor suitability rules. Products including Securitize’s BUIDL and Ondo’s OUSG use KYC whitelist systems, so the tokens can only move between wallets belonging to approved qualified investors.
That creates a direct mismatch with permissionless DeFi. The assets can be tokenized, but they cannot freely enter public lending pools such as Aave or Compound as collateral. Even permissioned markets such as Aave Horizon cover only a narrow institutional user base.
The article argues that this combination of high scale and low utilization is not an anomaly but part of the path to mainstream adoption. The first step is to move assets on-chain in a compliant way and build out custody, auditing, and transfer-agent processes across the full asset lifecycle. Only after that comes composability.
Infrastructure is still thin
DWF Labs managing partner Andrei Grachev said liquidity remains the limiting factor for RWA expansion on-chain. What is missing, he said, is the infrastructure needed for tokenized assets to trade at scale: real-time pricing, instant redemption, and secondary markets deep enough to support quotes.
The article describes this as the sector’s third major bottleneck. Market makers remain cautious because trading volumes are thin, making it hard to cover costs. Valuation of the underlying assets is often opaque, which raises inventory risk. Transfer restrictions tied to compliance then narrow the counterparty base even more.
With low turnover, many RWA tokens trade with spreads wider than in traditional financial markets. In shallow secondary markets, investors who want to use these assets in DeFi trading or borrowing can run into practical problems around pricing and liquidation.
Competition is shifting from issuance to use
The article says the second half of the RWA race is no longer centered only on who can issue more assets. The market is now moving toward a different question: who can make those assets usable.
Native credit protocols have a natural advantage here. Maple and Centrifuge were built with lending use cases in mind from the beginning, so their models encourage asset movement rather than simple custody. They are smaller in scale, but they point to one path for deeper integration between RWA and DeFi.
At the same time, distribution is becoming a new growth layer. Securitize has integrated UniswapX to support compliant on-chain trading, while Centrifuge has partnered with Morpho to open lending distribution channels. The article describes this as progress on the final mile between issuance and actual usage.
It also singles out gateway players such as Robinhood Crypto. For many DeFi protocols, the hardest challenge after launch is not issuing the product but finding users and getting them to act. Robinhood Crypto already has an app ecosystem, a wallet product, and customer relationships, giving newly issued assets a direct route to existing users.
The article gives one example. Maple’s yield-bearing token SyrupUSDG reached a circulating market value of $100 million within one month after listing on Robinhood Crypto. A comparable product promoted by the protocol itself, SyrupUSDT, took nine months to reach the same level.
That comparison leads to the article’s broader point: in the stage of mass adoption, channels, distribution networks, and existing user habits may matter more than the asset label itself.
The next filter goes beyond issuance volume
The article ends by framing the utilization paradox in RWA as a clash between traditional finance and crypto-native logic. One side prioritizes compliance, risk control, and yield from holding assets. The other favors composability, turnover, and modular on-chain innovation. The gap between those models is not likely to be closed quickly by any single platform or single technical fix.
The $32 billion figure shows that bringing traditional assets on-chain is possible. But low utilization shows that this is only the first step. The real test is not how many assets can be recorded on a blockchain, but how many can actually circulate on-chain, be used on-chain, and support new applications.
For builders and investors, the article says the next stage calls for broader evaluation standards. Issuance volume matters, but so does liquidity depth. Asset lists matter, but so does real usage. Tokenization is not the endpoint. Getting assets to move on-chain is the real start of the RWA story.