RWA deposits tripled to $7.4B while DeFi shrank — investors went shopping in TradFi's fridge 🧊

Tokenized real-world asset deposits across decentralized finance platforms more than tripled year over year to $7.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026, even as total DeFi deposits fell roughly 15%, according to a joint report titled "The Growth of Hybrid Finance" published Thursday by CoinShares and Token Terminal. The report covers the second quarter of 2025 through the second quarter of 2026, with all onchain data supplied by Token Terminal. CoinShares CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti said the divergence reflects demand driven by practical use cases rather than broader market conditions. "When an asset class grows through a downturn in its host ecosystem, demand is being driven by financial utility, not by market cycles," he said. "Investors are not leaving traditional finance behind. 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."

Yield-bearing stablecoins and tokenized Treasury products lead RWA deposits. Sky Protocol's sUSDS topped the category in Q2, giving holders exposure to a yield-generating version of its USDS stablecoin, while tokenized Treasury funds including BlackRock's USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) have become a major source of onchain collateral in decentralized lending markets. Other large deposit categories include JTRSY, private credit products such as JAAA, syrupUSDC and PRIME, and delta-neutral strategies like sUSDe. The report said RWA products currently offer yields ranging from about 3.2% to 5.5%, with lower-risk Treasury products at the bottom of the range and higher-yield strategies carrying additional risks. Almost 70% of RWA deposits sit on lending venues built on Ethereum, with Plasma emerging as the second-largest chain 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.

Tokenized gold and yield-bearing dollar products drove most RWA spot trading. CoinShares classified gold-backed stablecoins such as Tether Gold (XAUt) and Paxos Gold (PAXG) as tokenized gold products within its broader RWA category, with these assets generating significant trading volume as investors traded around gold price swings. RWA spot trading volumes rose roughly 220% year over year, even as overall DEX volumes fell about 70%, a divergence the report attributes to tokenized assets gaining traction as secondary markets where investors can trade ownership rather than only buy assets directly from issuers.

Onchain exposure to RWAs is also expanding into derivatives markets. RWA perpetual futures trading volumes and open interest kept climbing through a broader crypto-derivatives slowdown that began in October 2025, with RWA positions now making up more than a quarter of on-chain perpetuals open interest. Perpetuals activity concentrates in oil and precious metals, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, and technology and semiconductor stocks. On tradeXYZ, an RWA-focused perpetual futures platform, the asset class has continued growing despite a wider pullback in crypto-native derivatives.

The split has yet to translate into venue revenues, with application revenues falling across both lending and trading platforms over the year in what the report describes as 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, while 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.