A DWF Labs Research report estimates that more than US$31 billion of tokenised assets, excluding stablecoins, now sits on-chain, up 50 per cent this year. Growth has been led by US Treasuries and private credit, as asset managers digitise familiar products for blockchain-based distribution.
The more revealing figure is how little of that capital is being used in decentralised finance. Only around US$3 billion, or roughly 10 per cent of tokenised assets, is active as DeFi total value locked.
Large tokenised Treasury products such as BlackRock’s BUIDL, WTGXX, and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI are estimated to see fewer than 30 transfers a month.
The bottleneck is market structure
For Southeast Asian fintech founders, exchanges and infrastructure builders, the distinction matters. Tokenisation alone does not create liquidity, access or capital efficiency. Those outcomes depend on pricing, redemption and market access, where the current stack remains weak.
DWF Labs identifies three barriers. Pricing for private credit and real estate is too slow, with many products relying on net asset value updates that arrive daily at best. That makes it difficult for market makers to quote size without wide spreads.
Redemption is also cumbersome. The promise of blockchain finance is instant settlement, but many tokenised assets still take days to redeem because underlying assets and counterparties operate on legacy timelines. On-chain liquidity is too thin for institutional trades, while over-the-counter markets remain fragmented.
Regulation further limits composability. Transfer restrictions, know-your-customer checks and accreditation requirements are common across institutional issuances. These controls may be necessary for regulated assets, but they sit uneasily with permissionless DeFi protocols that rely on open participation and automated collateral flows.
“Liquidity is the binding constraint on scaling tokenisation on-chain,” said Andrei Grachev, Managing Partner at DWF Labs, pointing to the need for real-time pricing, instant redemption and deeper secondary markets.
Who captures the value
So far, the biggest winners have been issuers and asset managers that control distribution. Crypto-native infrastructure providers, including lending protocols, oracles, market makers and redemption venues, have captured a smaller share despite building much of the plumbing.
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That is beginning to shift. Maple Finance has drawn more than US$3.6 billion in TVL by using tokenised credit as stablecoin collateral through syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT. The wrapper model can bring less liquid assets into DeFi lending markets, although it also introduces allocation, disclosure and default risks.
Oracle providers are another critical layer. Pyth and Redstone are developing around-the-clock pricing infrastructure for tokenised stocks and commodities, a prerequisite if market makers are to quote tighter spreads on assets that previously depended on slower reference prices.
Redemption infrastructure is also emerging. Symbiotic’s Liquid Lane proposes shared vaults where market makers compete through a request-for-quote layer to price redemption discounts. Figure is taking a vertically integrated route by combining origination, secondary price discovery and settlement, including more than US$21 billion in home equity lines of credit originated on Provenance and YLDS, an SEC-registered yield-bearing stablecoin.
The next opportunity is not another Treasury wrapper
The report points to two areas where the next wave of value may emerge: non-US dollar debt and yield-bearing access to commodities and equities.
More than 94 per cent of tokenised assets remain US dollar-denominated, even though non-US dollar sovereign bonds account for more than 45 per cent of the traditional global fixed-income market. Emerging-market debt is especially relevant for Asia-facing investors because the yield gap is wider than in US Treasury products. Brazilian real bonds yield around 10 per cent, while Turkish lira bonds yield around 15 per cent, with non-deliverable forwards available to hedge currency risk.
The same logic applies to regional private credit across APAC and MENA, where borrowers may face higher funding costs and investors are searching for transparent, programmable access. For Southeast Asia, tokenisation could become more than a digitised fund wrapper if infrastructure can handle credit assessment, currency risk, servicing and secondary liquidity.
Commodities and equities offer a different opportunity. Tokenised commodities have generated more than US$4.8 billion on-chain, with US$4.8 billion on-chain, with US$ 90.7 billion in first-quarter 2026 activity. Tokenised equities have grown to more than US$1 billion and 185,000 holders in a year. These products show retail demand for price exposure, but they do not naturally generate yield.
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Protocols that can safely layer yield onto these assets, through stablecoin collateral, lending markets or options strategies, are likely to capture stickier users than platforms that simply list tokenised instruments.
Tokenisation’s first act was about issuance. Its second will be about utility. Until assets can be priced in real time, redeemed quickly and traded in sufficient depth, much of the capital brought on-chain will remain idle. For Southeast Asia’s builders, the opportunity is less about announcing another tokenised product and more about solving the market plumbing that makes those products useful.
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