The market for tokenized real-world assets has swelled to roughly $25.2 billion as of March 2026, according to data from tokenization platforms and custody providers. But a new report drawing on interviews with teams across the sector reveals a glaring disconnect: of the nearly $28.6 billion in on-chain tokenized capitalization, only about $2.81 billion — roughly 10% — is actually deployed inside DeFi protocols. The rest sits in wallets or on exchanges, waiting for the infrastructure to catch up.
The Integration Gap
That $2.81 billion figure represents the portion of tokenized assets that are actively used in lending, trading, or yield strategies on decentralized finance platforms. The gap between total tokenized value and DeFi utilization is one of the biggest unresolved questions in the space. Tokenization teams and custody providers interviewed in the first half of 2026 said the bottleneck isn't supply — it's interoperability and compliance. Many tokenized products were built on permissioned chains or with restricted transferability, making them hard to plug into open DeFi pools.
Securitize, a major tokenization platform, reported record Q1 results and now manages about $3.4 billion in tokenized assets. That growth is driven largely by institutional demand for on-chain treasuries and money-market funds. But even Securitize's assets aren't all actively deployed in DeFi; the firm's focus has been on compliant distribution, not DeFi composability.
BlackRock's Latest Filing
BlackRock filed in May 2026 to register two additional tokenized money-market and treasury fund share classes. The move extends the asset manager's push into on-chain funds, following earlier tokenized offerings. BlackRock didn't name the specific DeFi protocols or rails it plans to use, but the filing signals that the largest asset manager in the world expects tokenized funds to become a standard distribution channel.
The filing comes as the tokenized RWA market broadens beyond just treasuries. Issuers and rails now fall into four distinct buckets, according to the report: issuer and treasury rails, credit marketplaces, asset origination networks, and permissioned security chains backed by data and settlement infrastructure.
Key Altcoins and Their Roles
Among the altcoins closely tied to tokenized RWAs, ONDO handles tokenized treasuries and rails, MPL focuses on institutional credit, CFG runs asset origination networks, and POLYX powers a regulated security chain. LINK provides oracles and cross-chain messaging via CCIP, while XRP is used for settlement around tokenized fund actions. Each token sits in a different bucket, and their value capture depends heavily on the design of the product they support.
Many tokenized products succeed without funneling revenue to a native token. The report notes that compliance and interoperability increasingly decide which projects win, not raw transaction speed or total value locked alone. That shift puts a premium on tokens that can bridge permissioned and permissionless worlds.
What Determines Value Capture
For investors trying to figure out which RWA tokens might appreciate, the key question is whether the token is essential to the product's operation. Some tokens are pure governance, others are used for fees or staking, and some are little more than branding. The report's authors caution that a large market cap for a tokenized asset doesn't automatically mean the associated token will capture that value.
With BlackRock's new fund classes expected to go live later this year, and Securitize continuing to add assets, the integration gap between tokenized supply and DeFi demand will face its biggest test. Whether the infrastructure to close that gap arrives in 2026, or whether most tokenized value remains parked outside DeFi, is a question that won't wait long for an answer.
