The tokenized real-world asset market reached $24.9 billion in February 2026, up 289% from $6.4 billion one year prior, according to on-chain analytics firm Nexus Data Labs.
The headline growth, however, conceals a structural bottleneck: 88% of the $8.5 billion in RWA-backed stablecoins is sitting outside decentralized finance entirely, blocked by KYC restrictions and whitelisting requirements.
The market's composition is also changing. U.S. Treasuries and commodities drove 58% of total growth, but Treasury products' share of the overall RWA market fell from 59% to 43% as equities and gold expanded rapidly.
Treasuries Grow, But Lose Dominance
Tokenized U.S. Treasuries nearly tripled year-over-year to approximately $11 billion, with the top-three issuers' combined concentration falling from 61% to 48% as new entrants from Fidelity, VanEck, and ChinaAMC entered the market.
BlackRock's BUIDL fund now leads the category at $2.2 billion - up 239% over the period - while Ondo Finance (ONDO) combined Treasury exposure reached $2 billion. Superstate's USTB grew 499% to $800 million.
Equities and Gold Fill the Gap
Tokenized equities grew from near-zero to $786 million since mid-2025, with on-chain versions of NVDA, TSLA, SPY, and QQQ all now live.
That growth continued even as Bitcoin (BTC) fell below $70,000, suggesting equity demand on-chain is not correlated to broader cryptocurrency sentiment.
Tokenized gold supply nearly doubled from 687,000 to 1.3 million troy ounces over the same period.
Gold's spot price rose approximately 80% in parallel, but the supply expansion outpaced price appreciation - indicating investors are actively minting new on-chain gold rather than simply holding existing tokens through a rally.
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The Utilization Problem
Of the $8.5 billion in RWA-backed stablecoin supply tracked by Nexus Data, only $1 billion - roughly 11.8% - is actively deployed in DeFi protocols.
The remainder is held by investors who cannot access permissionless DeFi due to compliance restrictions embedded in the token structures themselves.
Permissionless alternatives tell a different story: reUSD posted 96.7% DeFi utilization, compared to near-zero for products like YLDS despite its $598 million in supply.
The gap illustrates a core tension in institutional RWA adoption. Capital is on-chain in name, but without composability it functions more as a record-keeping layer than as productive financial infrastructure.