RWAs have overtaken DEXs as the fifth-largest category in DFI by TVL
Real-world asset (RWA) protocols will be one of the winners of decentralized finance (DeFi's) in 2025, surpassing decentralized exchanges (DEXs) as the fifth largest category by total value locked (TVL), according to Defillama.
RWAs are now about $17 billion in TVL, up from $12 billion in Q4 2024, showing how quickly Treasuries, personal credit and other real-world claims have moved from scrap tests to the mainstream DeFi pipeline. Defilama said, “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 the growth of RWA is driven by balance-sheet incentives rather than testing, by making onchain, yield-generating assets such as high-to-long rates tokenized Treasurys and private credit, among improving regulatory transparency that lowers the conflict for institutional allocators.
RWAs move to the DeFi core
Earlier this year, excluding stablecoins, RWAs grew to $24 billion, with private credit and tokenized Treasurys identified as the main growth engines and Ethereum as the primary public settlement cover for onchain debt and fund structures.
Related: Emerging market economies to drive RWA tokenization by 2026: Crypto exec
In the year Until 2025, that market remained concentrated around small and large issuers and vehicles on Ethereum, while RWA.xyz data shows a network secondary including BNB Chain, Avalanche, Solana, Polygon, and Arbitrum, each with a low to mid-single digit percentage of public chain RWA value.
In parallel, permissioned infrastructure such as the Canton Network has become the main institutional hub for large RWA programs with more than 90% market share, privacy-preserving DeFi data and training space that can be plugged into the Liquid Rail.
Related: Canton Token Raises 27% After DTCC Lists Tokenized Treasury Plans
What is driving flows?
Tokenized US Treasurys such as BlackRock's USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), Circle's USYC, Franklin Templeton's BENJI, Ondo's OUSG and similar funds will remain the products of the entry, which will raise over several billion-dollars in December.
“The limit is no longer tokens, but liquidity and integration into TradFi,” said Liu, adding that the focus in 2026 will shift from the headline TVL to control and usage, who owns the issuance, where RWAs are settled as collateral, and which areas hold secondary market flows.
Gold, silver and the history of 2026
Gold and silver rallies are adding new legs to RWA's business, pulling more capital into diversified products. Recent data put the value of the commodity market, led by gold products such as Tether Gold and Paxos Gold, at close to $4 billion.
Liu said these activities are “raising. [tokenized commodities] From niche RWAs to macro-relevant assets with a genuine need for on-chain access and settlement in a 24/7 market, “with the help of pricing and protection levels that make it easy to plug into DeFi and institutional systems.
In the year Gold and silver break highs in 2026, suggesting “behavior proof” that price strength will attract extraction, which will attract liquidity and strengthen adoption beyond pure yield narratives.
He also identified interoperability as another key indicator and said that “tangible acceleration” will come when “identical products can move across locations and chains, not as individual products, but as independent collateral.”
