Zag net that tokenized real assets have now surpassed $25 billion, almost four times larger than last year. Six different asset categories are now each exceeding a billion, so the tokenization trend is really starting to take off.

But here’s the interesting part: much of that growth is actually just institutional allocations happening as one-offs. Asset managers are dumping money in, but there isn’t much active trading at the moment. Most transactions are large blocks around $10 million each, typical for institutional bundling rather than ongoing market activity.

The real problem I see: of the approximately $8.5 billion in RWA-backed stablecoins, only 12% are actually active in DeFi. The rest are locked behind KYC barriers and whitelisting. So you have all these billions in tokenized assets crossing over to blockchain, but they aren’t really integrating with open financial systems. That seems to be the bottleneck for the coming months.

The question is whether these assets will cross over into true DeFi composability or just remain working in closed structures in parallel. That will probably determine whether tokenization becomes truly scalable or not.