CoinDesk
Adjusted for illiquid private credit and restricted flagship products, real utilization of tokenized real-world assets on public blockchains sits closer to 20% than the widely-cited sub-1% figure, argues Katana's Matthew Fisher. The $51 billion in tokenized RWAs tracked across chains is dominated by instruments that were never built to move: Bernstein pegs private credit at 47% of the total, and the early flagship funds like BlackRock's BUIDL, Circle's USYC and Franklin Templeton's iBENJI ship behind whitelists and accreditation gates that block permissionless collateral use "by design." That mismatch between what gets tokenized and what was ever meant to move is the engine behind the wildly divergent utilization estimates published this year, from CoinShares' 19% to DeFiLlama's 11.7% to the headline-grabbing sub-1%.
Why it matters
The sub-1% number measures a fraction with theater on both sides. The numerator counts roughly $50 million deployed from $7.2 billion across three tokenized money market funds. The denominator loads in private credit that doesn't move off-chain either, plus trophy products whose holders bought the brand name rather than the yield. Strip out what was never mobile, correct for "parked by intent" holdings (foundations buying BUIDL to get BlackRock to deploy on its chain), and add back off-contract collateral use (Binance's BENJI margin, BUIDL derivatives margin, Kraken tokenized equity collateral), and the share of tokenized assets actually doing collateral work climbs to roughly 20%. CoinShares' independent Q2 count lands near 19% before any adjustment.
Market impact
The actual bottleneck is settlement, not demand. Tokenized RWAs redeem T+1, T+2 or on a quarterly calendar, turning the looping playbook into a sequential multi-day operation. A fund with quarterly redemptions takes a year to unwind at 4x. That duration mismatch is what kept institutional flows on the sidelines when Fisher worked on bringing Apollo's ACRED onchain as Polygon PoS collateral alongside Securitize, Gauntlet and a Morpho-powered vault.
Frequently asked questions
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Why does on-chain RWA utilization look so low?
The sub-1% figure mixes a numerator of $50M deployed from $7.2B across three tokenized money market funds with a $51B denominator that is 47% illiquid private credit and includes whitelisted flagship products. Both halves of the fraction contain assets that were never designed to move onchain as collateral.
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What is the "real" RWA utilization rate after adjustments?
After stripping illiquid private credit, accounting for "parked by intent" holdings, and adding back off-contract collateral use like Binance's BENJI margin and BUIDL derivatives margin, adjusted utilization climbs to roughly 20%. CoinShares' Q2 count lands near 19% before any adjustment.
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What is the actual bottleneck holding back RWA adoption?
Settlement, not demand. Tokenized RWAs redeem T+1, T+2 or on a quarterly calendar, turning looping into a sequential multi-day operation. A quarterly-redeeming fund like Apollo's ACRED can take a year to unwind at 4x leverage, a duration mismatch with markets built for atomic settlement.
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How do newer protocols solve the RWA settlement bottleneck?
Protocols like 3F, built on Morpho on Ethereum mainnet, replace sequential looping with onchain auctions where specialists front the full target leverage in a single shot. Twenty sequential settlement cycles collapse into one atomic transaction.
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What role does regulation play in RWA utilization?
The GENIUS Act established credible stablecoin rails, a prerequisite for institutions to hold these assets onchain. CFTC and SEC rulemaking on the administrative path is quietly removing the compliance anxiety that pushed issuers to over-restrict their tokens with whitelists and accreditation gates.
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