Forwarding the original title “Decoding the RWA Market: Market Size Surged 48% in the First Half of the Year, ZKsync ‘Counterattacks’ to Become the Second Largest Public Chain”

In the first half of 2025, a relatively low-profile sector in the cryptocurrency world—real-world asset (RWA) tokenization—has witnessed remarkable explosive growth. As of June 6, the global RWA market capitalization has soared to $23.39 billion (excluding stablecoins), a significant increase of 48.9% from $15.7 billion at the beginning of the year. Behind this growth, private credit (accounting for about 58%) and U.S. Treasury bonds (accounting for about 31.2%) form the absolute dual core of the market, together accounting for nearly 90% of the share.

However, behind this impressive report card lies deep-seated issues such as a high concentration of asset classes, limited liquidity, questionable transparency, and a low correlation with the native crypto ecosystem. RWA still has a long way to go to become a true “mainstream track.”

Private loans + U.S. Treasury bonds account for 90% of the market

Private credit has become the hottest asset type in the RWA market, with a total scale reaching 13.5 billion USD, accounting for approximately 57.7%.

Figure ranks first with an active loan amount of $10.19 billion. Figure is a blockchain financial technology service platform, currently focusing on Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOC), which allows users to obtain credit line loans up to 85% of their home’s value. According to its official data, HELOC has become the largest non-bank home equity credit line in the United States, providing a total of over $15 billion in credit line loans.

However, unlike other RWA that are generally issued on broad public chains, the Provenance blockchain used by Figure is a public but permissioned L1 blockchain. This design, similar to a consortium chain, allows Figure’s RWA assets to be better managed on one hand, while on the other hand it hinders the widespread circulation of these assets in the market. Therefore, although Figure’s RWA issued assets have exceeded $10 billion, their actual correlation with the crypto market is not high; these assets are mainly represented on-chain in the form of collateralized notes, and as of now, this portion of market share does not possess trading liquidity attributes. From the conventional definition of RWA assets, Figure’s RWA assets belong to a non-typical form of RWA.

U.S. Treasury bonds are the second-largest asset class in the RWA market, and the operating logic of this type of RWA is to convert traditional U.S. Treasury bonds, cash, and dollar-denominated assets such as repurchase agreements into digital tokens using blockchain technology. In the field of U.S. Treasury bonds, the largest issuance is BUIDL issued by BlackRock, with a current total issuance of approximately $2.9 billion.

The BUIDL Fund was initially launched on the Ethereum blockchain and has now expanded to include multiple blockchain networks such as Solana, Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon. Among them, the vast majority of the BUIDL Fund’s assets (approximately 93%) are still issued on Ethereum.

This RWA has better flexibility compared to the traditional method of directly purchasing US Treasury bonds, providing 24/7 liquidity. Traditional Treasury bond transactions may take several days to complete. However, BUIDL is currently open to qualified investors, with a minimum investment threshold of $5 million, and the current number of holders is 75. In addition, BUIDL has also launched a DeFi-compatible version called sBUIDL, which is an ERC-20 token representing a 1:1 claim on the BUIDL fund. sBUIDL can interact with DeFi protocols such as Euler.

Apart from private credit and US Treasury bonds, commodities rank as the third largest RWA asset class, primarily consisting of tokenized gold issued by institutions such as Paxos and Tether, with a current total market capitalization of approximately $1.51 billion.

ZKsync and Stellar become dark horses in the RWA market public chain.

In the comparison of public chains, Ethereum remains the most favored blockchain network for RWA assets. Currently, it accounts for 55% of the market value of $8.74 billion (it should be noted that this proportion is relative to all assets issued on public chains, which is approximately $12.55 billion, and assets issued on proprietary chains like Figure are not included in this statistic).

Among them, the $2.7 billion assets issued by BUIDL account for 36.48% of Ethereum, while the others are tokenized gold such as PAXG and XAUT.

In the comparison of public chains, it is somewhat surprising that ZKsync has become the second-highest RWA public chain with an asset issuance volume of $2.25 billion. The reason ZKsync has achieved such a high RWA asset issuance volume is mainly due to Tradable, an asset management company that introduces web3 technology. Tradable allows institutions to initiate investment opportunities on its platform and specify the details of the investment purposes and transaction information. Investors choose to invest based on these opportunities that interest them, such as a senior secured loan in fintech with a financing of $110 million and a return rate of 15%. Or a term loan provided to a top law firm with a return rate of 15.5% and a financing amount of $57 million. According to official data from Tradable, there are currently 34 assets online, with an average APY of 10%. However, the company clearly lacks motivation in external promotion and operations, having only retweeted 2 news articles on Twitter without any original content being published, and the official news page remains at news from 2023.

In addition, upon reviewing the contract information of Tradable, PANews found that these contracts are all non-open source and do not interact with crypto assets, with all contracts showing the token amount as zero. Therefore, from this perspective, there are certain doubts regarding the actual amount of RWA assets on-chain for Tradable.

In addition, Stellar is the third-ranked network in the RWA market, which is somewhat unexpected. Currently, the RWA asset issuance on this network is approximately $498 million, with BENJI issued by Franklin Templeton accounting for about $489 million, making it the absolute leader. BENJI is also a monetized fund based on U.S. Treasury bonds, with a total issuance of approximately $770 million, of which 63% is issued on the Stellar chain.

As an established public chain created in 2014, Stellar has gradually faded from the mainstream public chain market in recent years. In 2024, it launched the Soroban smart contract platform and introduced a $100 million adoption fund to promote development and project building. Additionally, it has facilitated collaborations with multiple contracting institutions such as Franklin Templeton, Paxos, and Circle in the past year, which has allowed Stellar to surpass popular public chains like Solana in the RWA field, becoming the third-ranked RWA issuing public chain. However, from a compositional perspective, Stellar’s RWA asset issuance is heavily reliant on Franklin’s issuance volume, making it relatively singular.

The issuance of RWA on the Solana network ranks fourth, amounting to approximately $349 million. Although the scale is not large, in terms of growth rate, it has increased by 101% since January 2025, showing a rapid growth. In terms of distribution categories, it is mainly composed of U.S. Treasury bonds.

Behind the impressive data, the RWA market conceals challenges.

The data shows that the growth of the RWA market is in a remarkable state. However, it seems that there are also some potential challenges behind this remarkable growth.

First, the asset classes are primarily concentrated in private credit and U.S. Treasury bonds. However, the data for leading private credit projects like Figure and Tradable is not transparent. Moreover, the RWA assets of Figure essentially only exist in on-chain form, and most do not have trading attributes. From this perspective, these types of assets have not truly realized the effects of blockchain technology enhancing traditional assets in terms of liquidity and transparency.

Secondly, in the field of government bonds, many products and stablecoins have similarities in their issuance methods. In fact, interest-generating stablecoins that are collateralized by U.S. government bonds essentially offer a similar yield effect, and RWA products centered around government bonds face competitive pressure from stablecoins.

Thirdly, the asset classes are overly concentrated, although RWA has been established for several years now. However, the current dominant assets are still concentrated in government bonds and private credit issuance methods (accounting for nearly 90%). The proportion of commodity, stock, and fund products remains very low. The development of these asset classes is limited mainly due to challenges related to physical storage, legal compliance, costs, and other factors.

As of now, the total market size of RWA is only $23.3 billion, which is far less than the size of the stablecoin market ($236 billion), and even less than the market cap of some newly issued public chain tokens. This scale is far from the market’s imagination of a so-called trillion-dollar RWA market. From the perspective of asset operation, the current RWA is almost exclusively a domain for institutions and big players, and it is quite distant from the operational methods of the traditional crypto market. For ordinary investors, participating in the RWA track seems to have certain difficulties, and RWA still has a long way to go before it becomes a new hotspot for retail investors.

Overall, the RWA market in the first half of 2025 has indeed delivered a report card with a market value increase of nearly 50%, and the dual structure of private credit and U.S. Treasury bonds is becoming increasingly clear. The potential of RWA is undeniable, but how to break through the current bottlenecks and achieve a qualitative change in terms of transparency, liquidity, and ecological integration will be key to determining whether it is a fleeting phenomenon or opens a new chapter in finance.

Statement:

1. This article is reprinted from [PANews] , Original title “The Data Analysis of the RWA Market: Market Size Surged 48% in the First Half of the Year, ZKsync ‘Counterattacks’ to Become the Second Largest Public Chain”, copyright belongs to the original author [ Frank, PANews If there are any objections to the reprint, please contact Gate Learn TeamThe team will process it as quickly as possible according to the relevant procedures.
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