The Rise of Composable RWAs

$27 billion in tokenized RWAs. But only ~$2.7 billion is actively deposited into decentralized lending markets — posted as collateral, supplied into vaults, used in yield strategies. It went from near zero in a year. This article looks at where that capital is, what's driving it, and what it tells us about what comes next.

The setup: from regulatory clarity to composable capital

Three regulatory milestones in late 2025 and early 2026 accelerated tokenization. In July 2025, the GENIUS Act created the first comprehensive U.S. framework for payment stablecoins, requiring 1:1 backing and clear oversight. In March 2026, the SEC and CFTC jointly classified major blockchain tokens as digital commodities rather than securities. Days later, the SEC approved Nasdaq to trade and settle tokenized stocks and ETFs on its main market.

These milestones contributed to an acceleration already underway. Stablecoins — the settlement layer for tokenized assets — crossed $330 billion in total supply, up 12x since 2020. The number of active stablecoins grew from 31 to 215 over the same period. Tokenized RWAs followed a similar trajectory, with AUM growing 27x over two years to roughly $27 billion, from a handful of categories to the seven we track in our overview dashboard, including reinsurance and stocks.

Beyond the headline AUM, the more relevant question is how much of that capital is actually doing something inside DeFi. About $2.7 billion in RWA tokens are actively deposited across DeFi lending markets — roughly 10% of the $27 billion in tokenized AUM. That 10% barely existed a year ago. Composability — the ability for a tokenized asset to be posted as collateral, borrowed against, and looped through yield strategies across protocols and chains — is arguably the most promising benefit of tokenization.

Note: We measure RWA tokens deposited or supplied into lending protocols — collateral and vault supply only. We exclude borrowed amounts and stablecoins supplied as lending liquidity, to focus on the RWA assets themselves being put to work in DeFi. All numbers are as of April 16, 2026.

Where the ~$2.7B is deposited

Four venues across Ethereum, Solana, and multiple L2s.

@Morpho ($957M) — permissionless, 41 RWA assets listed across 10 chains. Professional curators like Gauntlet and Steakhouse manage vaults that allocate capital into these markets, building structured leveraged strategies on top of tokenized real-world assets.

@aave (broader markets) ($929M) — Maple syrup tokens deposited across Plasma, Base, and Ethereum. Institutional credit flowing permissionlessly to wherever the best lending economics are.

@kamino ($587M) — the largest Solana lending protocol and RWA venue. PRIME $315M (HELOC lending yield), syrupUSDC $161M, ONyc $71M (reinsurance), USCC $18M, plus xStocks markets ($21M across seven tokenized equities).

Aave Horizon ($161M) — the permissioned, institution-focused RWA market on Aave. 256 addresses with an average position of $1.5M. USCC $105M, USTB $46M, VBILL $7M, JAAA $3M. $124M in stablecoins actively borrowed at 77% utilization.

@0xfluid ($109M) — reUSD $94M (reinsurance), gold $12M, syrup $2M. Notable for hosting Re Protocol's reUSD as collateral that doesn't appear on the other venues.

What gets tokenized is not what gets used

There is a striking divergence between the assets that dominate tokenized AUM and those that are actually deposited as collateral in lending protocols. The two leaderboards are almost inverted.

Treasuries are 48.5% of tokenized AUM ($13.2B) but just 2% of DeFi deposits. Credit is 17% of AUM but roughly 80% of deposits. Commodities are 25.2% of AUM but barely 1%.

Credit dominates because the math works. @maplefinance's syrupUSDC yields roughly 6%, while T-Bills offer about 3.5%. When your collateral earns 6% and you can borrow stablecoins at 3%, you have positive carry. Curators like @gauntlet_xyz build explicit looping strategies on top: post the RWA, borrow against it, buy more. This is designed, risk-managed leverage — and it explains why credit assets appear across every major lending venue: $957M on Morpho, $929M on Aave, $476M on Kamino.

Looking beyond the established categories, reinsurance is emerging as a genuinely new composable asset class. @re Protocol's reUSD appears across multiple venues — $96M on Morpho (including $50M in Pendle PT-reUSD) and $94M on Fluid — while @onrefinance's ONyc accounts for $71M on Kamino. Together, reinsurance represents $324M in tokenized AUM (1.2% of the total) and roughly $261M in DeFi deposits (10% of the total), with about 80% of all tokenized reinsurance actively deposited in lending protocols, the highest deposit rate of any asset class by far.

Tokenized equities are also appearing in DeFi: SPYx ($7.9M on Morpho), @BackedFi xStocks on Kamino ($21M across SPYx, TSLAx, QQQx, NVDAx, GOOGLx, MSTRx, AAPLx), and deSPXA ($3.6M). Small amounts, but the infrastructure is live and borrowing against equities is happening.

The divergence is instructive. Tokenization rewards safety and familiarity — Treasuries are easy to understand, easy to regulate, transparent (frequent NAV updates and easy oracle pricing), and attractive to institutional balance sheets. Composability rewards something different: yield spreads and leverage economics.

The collateral mix is shifting in real time

The dominance of high-yield credit may be partly a function of timing. Aave Horizon offers the clearest evidence.

When Horizon launched in August 2025, USCC — @SuperstateInc's Crypto Carry Fund — delivered roughly 15% APY from its basis trade on crypto futures. That yield made it 93% of all RWA collateral. T-Bill products were listed but ignored.

Since then, USCC's yield has compressed to roughly 4% as basis spreads narrowed, converging with T-Bill yields at 3-4%. The result: USCC's collateral share dropped from 93% to about 67%, while USTB surged from under $1M to $45.6M in 30 days — a 570% increase. The market is diversifying as the yield gap narrows.

This matters beyond Horizon. If credit yields compress market-wide — as they tend to in mature markets — the collateral mix across all venues will likely diversify. The assets that dominated the first wave (high-yield credit) may not dominate the next. Factors like risk profile, regulatory comfort, and settlement mechanics will start to matter more.

@pendle_fi adds another dimension to this evolution. Its principal tokens (PTs) — which let users lock in fixed yields on RWA products — account for $58M in Morpho deposits. Pendle also hosts direct RWA markets for thBILL and mTBILL, adding yield curve trading to the composability stack. As more RWA products list on Pendle, fixed-rate strategies become another channel for RWA distribution.

Permissionless access drives distribution

Maple Syrup is the clearest case study. syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT are permissionless ERC-20 tokens — technically a hybrid between stablecoins and RWAs, since they're pegged 1:1 to USDC/USDT but earn yield from institutional credit. We include them as RWAs because the underlying exposure is real-world lending. Anyone can mint them, trade them, or deposit them into any lending protocol. No KYC, no whitelist, no partnership required.

The result: 98% of syrupUSDT on @Plasma and 99% of syrupUSDC on @base are actively deployed on Aave. Morpho curators like Gauntlet independently built leveraged vaults around Syrup without coordinating with Maple. syrupUSDC also reached $161M on Kamino (Solana).

Each integration adds utility, utility attracts capital, capital justifies more integration. This flywheel is how $929 million ended up distributed across three chains organically.

This matters because distribution is what the industry identifies as its top challenge. @centrifuge's Tokenization Outlook 2026 report found that 86% of operators say scaling distribution for existing products matters more than launching new ones. Maple on Aave shows that permissionless composability is itself a distribution channel.

The frontier: $1.85B tokenized, $13M composable

Centrifuge illustrates both the opportunity and the gap for RWAs. It's one of the largest tokenization platforms, with now nearly $2 billion in AUM across institutional products: JTRSY (a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund) at $1.52 billion, JAAA (a tokenized AAA-rated CLO fund) at $403 million, ACRDX (Apollo's diversified credit fund) at $52 million, and the recently launched SPXA (the first tokenized S&P 500 index fund) at $3.7 million. However, only about $13 million of that is composable in DeFi.

The gap comes down to timing and design. deRWA wrappers are permissonless but only went live in September 2025. On the other hand, permissioned design of other established products slows integration. Liquidity is thin.

But integration is accelerating. Resolv committed $100M of JAAA on Horizon. Falcon Finance added JAAA and JTRSY as collateral for USDf. Grove is deploying $250M on Avalanche. LayerZero enables distribution across 165+ networks. And deSPXA — the DeFi wrapper for Centrifuge's S&P 500 fund — has already reached $3.6M in TVL with $7.9M in DEX volume, showing early organic activity and the potential of the deRWA approach: permissionless wrappers running in parallel to permissioned institutional products.

Three takeaways

1. Growth rates matter more than current size. $2.7 billion in RWA deposits across DeFi lending markets — roughly 10% of the $27 billion in tokenized AUM. But that $2.7 billion barely existed a year ago. The absolute numbers are still small, but what matters is the growth rate.

2. What gets tokenized is not what gets used. Treasuries are 48.5% of tokenized AUM but 2% of DeFi deposits. Credit is 17% of AUM but 80% of deposits. Higher yields create positive carry that justifies leverage loops — 6%+ credit yields work, 3.5% Treasury yields don't. But as macro conditions shift and yield spreads change across asset classes, the collateral composition adapts with different assets and emerging categories like reinsurance.

3. Permissionless access drives distribution. Maple's syrup tokens — a hybrid between RWAs and stablecoins — reached over $1 billion across Aave and Kamino on four chains. The token was designed to be composable, so the market composed it. Assets that plug in easily find adoption. Assets that require whitelisting are catching up, but more slowly.

All data referenced in this article is freely available on Dune. Start with the RWA Overview for AUM by category, or dive into venue-specific dashboards: Morpho RWA, Aave Horizon, Maple on Aave, Centrifuge, Kamino RWA TVL. Data as of April 16, 2026.

If this data is useful for your work — risk models, portfolio analytics, market intelligence, compliance monitoring — it's available programmatically via SQL API, Datashare (Snowflake/BigQuery), and dbt connector. Visit dune.com/enterprise.