Deposits of tokenized real-world assets into decentralized lending platforms and exchanges more than tripled over the past year, climbing from $2.3 billion to $7.4 billion, even as total deposits across DeFi fell by approximately 15%.

The figures come from The Growth of Hybrid Finance, published Thursday by asset manager CoinShares and on-chain data provider Token Terminal. It is the pair's second joint report, covering the second quarter of 2025 through the second quarter of 2026, with all data supplied by Token Terminal.

Over the past 365 days, real-world assets (RWAs) have moved beyond tokenisation into increasingly active onchain markets. Together with @tokenterminal, we look at the growth of Hybrid Finance across deposits, trading and derivatives, and what could define its next phase.… pic.twitter.com/D8kEvM1A6j — CoinShares (@CoinSharesCo) August 6, 2026

This divergence runs through three distinct markets. Aggregate spot volumes on decentralized exchanges declined by around 70% over the period, while spot trading volumes in tokenized real-world assets rose by roughly 220%. On perpetual futures venues, both trading volumes and open interest in RWAs continued climbing through a broader slowdown that began in October 2025, and RWA positions now account for more than a quarter of on-chain perpetuals open interest.

Tokenized Treasury and multi-strategy funds including JTRSY, BUIDL and sUSDS account for the largest share of activity, followed by private credit products such as JAAA, syrupUSDC and PRIME, and delta-neutral strategies like sUSDe. Tokenized gold leads spot trading volume. Perpetuals activity concentrates in oil and precious metals, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, and technology and semiconductor stocks.

"Investors are not leaving traditional finance behind," CoinShares co-founder and CEO Jean-Marie Mognatti said in a statement. "Look at what is actually being used on-chain. Treasuries, gold, the S&P 500, semiconductor stocks. Not one of them is a crypto asset."

Ethereum Dominates Collateral

Almost 70% of RWA deposits sit on lending venues built on Ethereum. Plasma has emerged as the second-largest destination, supported by Aave's expansion beyond Ethereum, while Solana's growth has "largely been driven" by native RWA lending platform Kamino. Deposits remain concentrated on Aave, Morpho and Kamino.

That activity has yet to translate into venue revenues. Application revenues fell across both lending and trading platforms over the year, in what the report calls an early stage of adoption. Hyperliquid is the exception, generating "substantially more application revenue" than any other trading or lending venue and overtaking Solana and Ethereum as the top revenue-generating chain. Decrypt reported in July that real-world assets had outpaced crypto on Hyperliquid for the first time in a single week, with chipmaker SK Hynix the most-traded stock.

The split is not new. In February, tokenized real-world assets had grown 8.7% in a month to $24.8 billion as DeFi's total value locked fell 25% to $94.8 billion—a rotation 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz attributed to compressed DeFi yields against roughly 4% on tokenized Treasuries. BlackRock, whose BUIDL fund is among those named in the report, launched two more tokenized money market funds on Monday, swiftly followed by the launch of tokenized share classes for European money market funds holding a combined $311 billion.

Scale remains modest. Around $2.2 billion of a global equity market worth more than $100 trillion has been tokenized, a position the report likens to stablecoins in 2019—when the entire stablecoin market capitalization was under $6 billion, before growing past $200 billion within five years. The analysis covers distributed assets only—those that can be moved to wallets outside the issuing platform—placing networks such as Canton and Provenance outside its scope. That restriction means the figures capture assets flowing through permissionless, publicly verifiable infrastructure rather than the broader universe of tokenized securities held on institutionally controlled ledgers, a distinction that may matter as more regulated financial products are issued onchain.