Tokenized Treasuries are not leading RWA because they're the most exciting asset class.

They're leading because they're the easiest real-world asset for DeFi to underwrite.
That's the important part.
A short-duration Treasury product is liquid, yield-bearing, familiar to institutions, and simple enough for protocols to price as collateral.
Private credit can't do that cleanly yet.
Private equity definitely can't.
So when RWA market cap onchain moved from under $6B a year and a half ago to nearly $32B by mid-June 2026, the money didn't spread evenly across every "real-world asset" narrative.
It crowded into the asset class DeFi could actually use first: government bonds.
The biggest products in that segment now are:
- Circle's USYC: about $3.07B
- BlackRock's BUIDL: about $2.37B
- Ondo's USDY + OUSG: about $2.7B combined
- Franklin Templeton's BENJI + iBENJI: about $2.4B combined
- Superstate's USTB: about $779M
So yes, yield helped.
T-bills paying 4-5% gave stablecoin holders a reason to care. And after stablecoin regulation became clearer in 2025, tokenized Treasuries became one of the cleaner places for yield-seeking capital to move.
But the bigger point is composability.
A Treasury token onchain doesn't just sit there like a normal T-bill at a custodian.
It can be routed.
A loop has formed inside DeFi:
1. Stablecoins move into tokenized Treasuries
2. Yield gets stripped out on Pendle
3. The Treasury token goes into Morpho or Aave as collateral
4. Stablecoins get borrowed back out
5. Capital rotates again
This didn't exist in any serious form two years ago.
Now it's becoming a normal part of how money moves onchain.
This is why tokenized bonds matter more than people think. Not because they're exciting. They're not. They're literally the most boring asset you can bring onchain.
But boring is exactly why they work.
They're simple enough for institutions to understand, stable enough for DeFi to underwrite, and useful enough to become collateral.
Private credit is growing too, but that's a harder game.
Figure has originated $19B+ in tokenized home equity loans on its own chain.
Centrifuge holds around $1.6B in TVL and now works with Apollo and MakerDAO.
Maple manages close to $4B and recently launched on Base.
But private credit comes with more moving parts.
Underwriting, defaults, servicing, legal claims, liquidity gaps, all the messy stuff you don't get with a short-duration Treasury product.
Long term, that's probably the bigger story.
For context, stablecoins are roughly a $300B market. RWA at $32B is still just a little over 10% of that, but it's growing faster in percentage terms.
Citi expects private equity and venture funds to become the most tokenized asset class by 2030.
BCG expects tokenized assets, including stablecoins, to reach the trillions by the early 2030s.
I don't think bonds are the final form of RWA.
They're the entry point.
The cleanest asset came first. The messy ones come next. And that's probably where the real market gets built.