Real-world Assets Top Dexs To Become 5th-largest Category In Defi...

RWA protocols have overtaken decentralized exchanges by total value locked, as tokenized Treasurys, private credit and commodities become core onchain building blocks.

Real-world asset (RWA) protocols are one of decentralized finance’s (DeFi’s) winners in 2025, overtaking decentralized exchanges (DEXs) to become the fifth-largest category by total value locked (TVL), according to DefiLlama.

RWAs now account for about $17 billion in TVL, up from $12 billion in Q4 2024, highlighting how quickly tokenized Treasurys, private credit and other real-world claims have moved from niche experiments to core DeFi plumbing. As DefiLlama noted, “At the start of this year, they weren’t even in the top 10 categories.”

Vincent Liu, chief investment officer at Kronos Research, told Cointelegraph that RWA growth is being driven by “balance-sheet incentives rather than experimentation,” with higher-for-longer rates making tokenized Treasurys and private credit attractive as onchain, yield-bearing assets, amid improving regulatory clarity that is lowering friction for institutional allocators.

Earlier this year, RWAs excluding stablecoins had grown to about $24 billion, with private credit and tokenized Treasurys identified as the main growth engines and Ethereum as the dominant public settlement layer for onchain debt and fund structures.

Related: Emerging market economies to drive RWA tokenization in 2026: Crypto exec

Through 2025, that market has remained concentrated around a small group of large issuers and vehicles on Ethereum, while RWA.xyz data shows a second tier of networks, including BNB Chain, Avalanche, Solana, Polygon and Arbitrum, each capturing low‑to-mid single‑digit percentage shares of public‑chain RWA value.

Related: Canton token rallies 27% after DTCC outlines tokenized Treasury plans

Tokenized US Treasurys remain the gateway product, with platforms like the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), Circle’s USYC, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, Ondo’s OUSG, and similar funds pushing the combined tokenized Treasury segment above the multi‑billion‑dollar mark by December.

Liu said that “the constraint is no longer tokenization itself, but liquidity, and integration into TradFi,” adding that attention in 2026, “attention should shift from headline TVL to control and usage, who owns issuance, where RWAs are deployed as collateral, and which venues capture secondary market flow.”

Source: CoinTelegraph