DWF Labs: $31 Billion in RWAs Onchain, But Less Than 10% Active in DeFi
Institutions have moved more than $31 billion of real-world assets (RWAs) onto blockchains, but a new report from DWF Labs Research shows that less than 10%—roughly $3 billion—is active in decentralized finance (DeFi). The rest sits idle in wallets, held as long-term positions rather than circulating through lending markets, trading venues, or collateral systems.
This gap raises a central question: is tokenization merely digitizing capital, or is it making capital more productive? The report points to major tokenized U.S. Treasury funds such as Blackrock’s BUIDL, which sees fewer than 30 transfers per month despite holding billions in assets. DWF Labs said the tokenization boom is real, but the market currently looks more like an issuance story than a liquidity story.
DWF Labs identifies three structural barriers holding back secondary activity. First, pricing: private credit and real estate assets often rely on net asset value updates that arrive daily at best, making it difficult for market makers to quote large trades tightly. Second, 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 are fragmented and often inaccessible to retail users. Third, regulation: transfer restrictions, know-your-customer checks, and accreditation requirements 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.”
So far, asset managers issuing tokenized products have benefited most, while crypto-native infrastructure providers have captured less upside. However, DWF Labs says the imbalance is beginning to change. Maple Finance has attracted over $3.6 billion in total value locked by wrapping tokenized credit into stablecoin collateral products. Pyth and Redstone are building 24/7 pricing infrastructure for tokenized stocks and commodities. Symbiotic’s Liquid Lane uses an RFQ model where market makers compete to price redemption discounts. Figure is integrating origination, secondary price discovery, and settlement into one stack.
The next opportunity may come outside the dominant U.S. dollar market, as more than 94% of tokenized assets are dollar-denominated. DWF Labs highlights emerging-market debt—such as 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, with tokenized stocks already growing to over $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.