Blackrock, Maple, and Figure Compete to Unlock Utility for $31 Billion in RWAs
Institutions have moved more than $31 billion of real-world assets ( RWAs) onto blockchains. The problem is that most of it is barely moving.
A new report from DWF Labs Research says less than 10% of tokenized real-world assets, or roughly $3 billion, is active in DeFi. The rest is largely sitting in wallets, held as long-term positions rather than circulating through lending markets, trading venues or collateral systems.
That gap raises a central question for tokenization: is capital simply being digitized, or is it becoming more productive?
The report points to major tokenized U.S. Treasury funds such as Blackrock’s BUIDL, which it says sees fewer than 30 transfers per month despite holding billions of dollars in assets. DWF Labs said the tokenization boom is real, but the current market still looks more like an issuance story than a liquidity story.
Why Tokenized Capital Is Stuck
DWF Labs identifies three structural barriers holding back secondary activity.
The first is pricing. Private credit and real estate assets often rely on net asset value updates that arrive daily at best. That makes it difficult for market makers to quote large trades tightly.
The second is settlement and redemption. Many tokenized products still take days to redeem, while onchain liquidity remains too thin for institutional-sized flows. Over-the-counter markets exist, but they are fragmented and often inaccessible to retail users.
The third is regulation. Transfer restrictions, know-your-customer checks, and accreditation requirements can make tokenized assets hard to plug into permissionless DeFi.
“ Liquidity is the binding constraint on scaling tokenization onchain,” said Andrei Grachev, managing partner at DWF Labs. “What’s missing is the infrastructure to make those assets tradeable at scale. Solve that, and tokenization becomes a wider market story instead of an institutional one.”
That constraint has also shaped who captures value. So far, asset managers issuing tokenized products have benefited most. Crypto-native infrastructure providers, including lending protocols, pricing oracles, market makers, and redemption venues, have captured less of the upside.
Infrastructure Firms Move to Close the Gap
DWF Labs says that the imbalance is beginning to change.
Maple Finance has attracted more than $3.6 billion in total value locked by wrapping tokenized credit into stablecoin collateral products. Pyth and Redstone are building a 24/7 pricing infrastructure for tokenized stocks and commodities. Symbiotic’s Liquid Lane uses an RFQ model in which market makers compete to price redemption discounts. Figure is taking a different route by integrating origination, secondary price discovery, and settlement into one stack.
The next opportunity may come outside the dominant U.S. dollar market. More than 94% of tokenized assets are dollar-denominated, even though non-dollar sovereign bonds make up a large share of traditional fixed income. DWF Labs highlights emerging-market debt, including Brazilian real bonds yielding around 10% and Turkish lira bonds near 15%, as a gap waiting to be addressed.
The firm also sees room in tokenized commodities and equities. Commodities have already shown demand, while tokenized stocks have grown to more than $1 billion with 185,000 holders in about a year.
For DWF Labs, tokenization’s first phase proved that assets can move onchain. The next phase will test whether those assets can trade, settle, and generate yield at scale. Whoever solves that problem may capture more value than the issuers themselves.
