Data source: http://RWA.xyz
The true size of the total assets of the RWA track
The trillion-dollar RWA track in the institutional research report does not include stablecoin projects, that is, the total asset size of RWA in the strict sense, including private credit, US bonds, commodities, institutional alternative funds, non-US bonds, corporate bonds, and stocks, was $13.55B as of December 1.
The total asset size of stablecoin projects is $192.78B.
Of course, RWA enthusiasts can argue that ~90% of the underlying assets of USDT/USDC stablecoins are short-term US Treasury bonds, and a large part of the underlying assets of decentralized stablecoin USDS (formerly DAI) are short-term US Treasury bonds. They are similar to ONDO’s USDY and Elixir’s deUSD, except that Tether and Circle, the issuers of USDT/USDC, do not distribute the underlying asset US Treasury bond income to users.
Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with the logic of this statement, so the actual size of the total assets of the RWA track in a broad sense should be $206.33B, which has already achieved 20% of the trillion-dollar scale target.
Asset size distribution of the RWA track
At the beginning of 2024, when Mr. Meng Yan @myanTokenGeek initiated a big discussion on RWA on Zhongtui, in the low-interest environment on the chain at that time (the interest rate of stablecoins on AAVE has been below 2% for a long time), the tokenization of US bonds was the hottest thing in the RWA track and occupied an absolute share of the RWA market.
But less than two years have passed, and the market landscape of the RWA track has changed dramatically.
With Figure Markets joining the private credit segment with a $60 million Series A funding round led by Jump Crypto, Pantera Capital and Lightspeed Faction, its rapidly expanding business this year has not only offset the decline in the businesses of Maple, Centrifuge, Goldfinch, Curve and TrueFi in the same field, but also increased the scale of private credit to $9.40B, far exceeding the total asset size of $2.60B for tokenized U.S. debt.
24 Annual issuance of RWA assets
As can be seen from the attached figure, the top three RWA asset issuance sizes per month in 24 years are all stablecoins, U.S. Treasury tokenization, and private credit.
In other words, if you want to find the most growth-oriented investment targets in the RWA track, you have to look among these three sub-sectors.
Chain distribution of RWA assets
Not surprisingly, Ethereum won with a market share of 76.51%.
Stellar ranked second with 9 RWA products with a total size of $245.58M with the help of wisdomtree.
Polygon ranked third due to its native stablecoin assets accumulated in the previous cycle and the tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds issued by BlackRock and Franklin Templeton.
Solana ranks fourth, with RWA mainly USDC and USDT, and USDY with a scale of $107.57M on Ondo. In this cycle, Solana has been a great success in the To C level, but needs to work hard in the To B level.
Avalanche is very active in RWA and has initiated and organized the RWA Alliance. Therefore, the RWA categories and issuers on its chain are very rich, but due to the poor development of the Avalanche chain this week, the overall scale is only $97.87M.
Investment targets in the RWA track
–Beta targets: sub-track leaders, such as SKY (formerly MakerDAO) and Ondo Finance in the field of US debt tokenization, Figure Markets in the field of private credit, Spiko in non-US debt tokenization, and Securitize in institutional funds, etc.
–Alpha targets: Elixir, which cooperates with BlackRock to issue the decentralized stablecoin deUSD based on tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds, Curve, the pricing market for RWA stablecoins, Goldfish, whose private credit scale is recovering, etc.
Of course, Alpha targets are not limited to the above ones, and the principle of looking for is still “disruptive innovation” or “exponential growth”.