Real-World Asset Deposits Jump to $7.4 Billion Through DeFi Downturn

Deposits of tokenized real-world assets across decentralized finance more than tripled to $7.4 billion over the past year, even as total funding in the sector declined.

CoinShares highlighted the split in its latest report with Token Terminal, noting that demand for tokenized assets is now driven by utility rather than by crypto market cycles.

Tokenized Assets Pull Away From the DeFi Slump

An earlier CoinShares report put the on-chain market value of tokenised assets above $40 billion. The new data measures how much of that is actually being used. The report covers on-chain activity from the second quarter of 2025 through the second quarter of 2026.

It showed that RWA deposits climbed from $2.3 billion to $7.4 billion year-on-year. Deposits stayed concentrated in yield-bearing products. 

Tokenized Treasury and multi-strategy funds, including JTRSY, BUIDL, and sUSDS, drove most of the growth. Aave (AAVE), Morpho (MORPHO), and Kamino (KMNO) held the deepest liquidity.

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Total DeFi deposits moved in the opposite direction. It fell roughly 15% as investors withdrew capital and token prices dropped. The pattern repeated in trading.

Crypto-native spot volumes on decentralized exchanges dropped about 70% over the year. RWA spot trading rose roughly 220% across the same window, though from a smaller base.

Why the Divergence Matters

Jean-Marie Mognetti, CoinShares co-founder and chief executive, frames the growth as a structural shift rather than a cyclical one. When an asset class expands amid a downturn in its host market, he argues, demand comes from utility rather than speculation.

“This divergence is the signal…tokenisation is structural, not cyclical,” he said.

The executive added that “we are still early.” Around $2.2 billion of the global equity market, worth over $100 trillion, has been tokenized, a figure that compares to stablecoins in 2019.

Whether the trend holds depends on the deepening of utility as more asset classes move on-chain. For now, the data show tokenized assets growing on their own trajectory, separate from the surrounding crypto market.

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