Tokenized Assets Pass 34 Billion USD and Onchain Investors Are Behaving Nothing Like Wall Street

Dune’s Q3 study of the tokenized real-world asset market reads less like a progress report and more like a field guide to a parallel financial culture. The four main asset classes the analytics firm tracked grew more than 140 percent over the year to 33.9 billion USD by the end of August, with an accompanying release putting total tokenized RWA value at 34.5 billion USD. But the headline number is arguably the least interesting part of the story. The fascinating part is what people actually do with these assets once they are onchain, because it does not match how traditional markets work at all.

The study, titled After Issuance: Reading the Onchain RWA Market, examined tokenized and synthetic exposure across equities, cash equivalents, credit and commodities. Dune tracked more than 2,600 products from over 250 issuers and platforms across 21 blockchains, drawing on supply, holder, trading, lending and pricing data. That breadth matters: this is not a survey of one issuance platform or a single chain’s ecosystem, but a cross-section of an entire market that barely existed in usable form three years ago.

Single Stocks Dominate, ETFs Lag

The clearest cultural divergence shows up in equities. Individual stocks represented 81 percent of tokenized equity holdings in spot markets, leaving only 19 percent in funds and ETFs. The value of those single-stock holdings increased ninefold over the previous year.

Flip that around for a moment. In traditional equity markets, investor money has been pouring into index funds and packaged products for a generation, to the point where passive vehicles are frequently cited as the dominant force in price discovery. Onchain, investors apparently want the individual company, not the basket. Dune chief executive Frederik Haga put it bluntly when speaking to Fortune about the findings: the way the market is wired is completely different.

Trading activity amplifies the contrast. Equities accounted for only a small portion of total tokenized asset supply, yet they produced 93 percent of spot trading during August. Tokenized equity spot volume reached 12.6 billion USD for the month, while equity perpetuals generated another 72.4 billion USD. In other words, the smallest asset class by supply is doing almost all of the moving.

The derivatives data has its own quirks. Asian equities accounted for 24 percent of equity perpetual open interest, and memory-chip companies were disproportionately active, producing 47 percent of August equity perpetual volume. One SK Hynix contract reached annualized funding of 308 percent during July, an extraordinary premium that shows traders were willing to pay heavily to maintain long exposure to the artificial intelligence hardware trade. A separate recent reading of the RWA perpetual market found public equities generated roughly 175 billion USD in Q3 volume, close to 48 percent of tracked RWA perpetual activity.

Cash Sits, Credit Circulates

Cash-equivalent products remain the heavyweight by raw value. Dune measured 17.8 billion USD in tokenized cash-equivalent products, with more than 95 percent of Treasury exposure concentrated in money-market funds and Treasury bills. These are balance-sheet assets: things institutions buy and hold for yield. Accordingly, secondary trading in them is almost nonexistent. Only 0.006 percent of tokenized cash-equivalent supply traded during August, despite the category representing roughly half the assets in the study.

Tokenized credit behaves in the opposite way. Between 19 and 21 percent of tokenized credit was deposited into lending protocols as collateral, compared with 0.4 percent for cash equivalents. That inverts the traditional collateral market, where government debt is the backbone of high-quality collateral and corporate credit plays a secondary role. Onchain, private credit is the stuff that circulates and gets reused, while tokenized Treasuries mostly sit still.

Dune’s earlier research frames the same split from another angle. In May the firm measured 27.5 billion USD of tokenized RWAs but only 1.7 billion USD actually being used through collateral, lending or other DeFi activity. Not everyone reads low DeFi usage as weak demand. Falcon Finance executive Artem Tolkachev has argued that Treasury products bought for yield serve a fundamentally different purpose from assets intended for active lending, so low circulation should not automatically be scored as a failure.

Fast Growth From a Small Base

Binance Research, using a slightly later snapshot dated Sept. 15, put tracked RWA assets at 34.18 billion USD after an 85.2 percent increase during 2026. Its breakdown showed bonds and money-market funds accounting for 18.29 billion USD, while tokenized equities reached 4.43 billion USD, up 390.4 percent since the start of the year.

That 390 percent figure deserves an asterisk, and Binance Research itself supplies one: tokenized equities are growing ferociously but remain tiny next to the equity markets they reference. Even a ninefold jump in single-stock holdings leaves the entire onchain equity market at a rounding error of global market capitalization. The growth rate is a signal of direction, not of arrival.

The regulatory backdrop is nonetheless becoming more accommodating. SEC relief now allows qualifying venues to test tokenized U.S. stock trading under strict conditions, and recent upgrades such as Base’s Cobalt release have built issuer controls directly into tokenized asset contracts. Infrastructure is being laid down ahead of the volume that may eventually use it.

What to Watch

For anyone tracking this market, Dune’s data suggests three tells. First, watch single-stock supply and turnover rather than aggregate RWA value, because equities are where the behavioral signal lives. Second, watch the credit-collateral ratio in lending protocols, since rising reuse of tokenized credit would confirm that onchain markets are developing their own collateral hierarchy rather than copying TradFi’s. Third, watch funding rates on equity perpetuals, especially in Asian tech names, because extreme premiums like the SK Hynix July episode reveal where speculative pressure is concentrated.

The 34 billion USD milestone is real, but the more durable finding from Q3 is structural: onchain investors prefer single names over baskets, trade the smallest asset class the hardest, and treat Treasuries as savings accounts while putting credit to work. Wall Street tokenized its assets; the behavior that arrived with them is something new.

Price snapshot at publication (Binance, 17:01 UTC, Oct. 1, 2026): BTC 84,226 USD, ETH 2,682.50 USD, SOL 117.25 USD.