The rise of composable RWA

Original translation by: Deng Chain Community

Content Summary and Introduction:
Currently, of the approximately $27 billion in RWA AUM, about $2.7 billion has entered the lending market and is used as collateral, yield strategies, or cyclical leverage. The assets truly adopted by DeFi are not the largest government bonds, but credit assets with more positive yield spreads, especially categories like Maple, Aave, Morpho, Kamino, and reinsurance. The design of open permissions, easy integration, and cross-chain distribution is becoming the core engine for the diffusion of RWA.

The Rise of Composable RWA

$27 billion of tokenized RWA, but only about $2.7 billion has actually been deposited into decentralized lending markets—used as collateral, injected into vaults, or for yield strategies. It has grown rapidly from nearly zero within a year. This article will explore where this capital is flowing, what is driving it, and what it signifies.

Background: From Regulatory Clarity to Composable Capital

Three regulatory milestones at the end of 2025 and early 2026 accelerated the tokenization process.

• In July 2025, the GENIUS Act established the first comprehensive framework for payment stablecoins in the U.S., requiring 1:1 reserve backing and clear regulation.

• In March 2026, the SEC and CFTC jointly classified major blockchain tokens as digital commodities rather than securities.

• A few days later, the SEC approved Nasdaq to trade and settle tokenized stocks and ETFs on its main market.

These milestones propelled an already accelerating trend. Stablecoins—the settlement layer for tokenized assets—saw total supply surpass $330 billion, growing 12 times since 2020. During the same period, the number of active stablecoins grew from 31 to 215. Tokenized RWA also showed a similar trajectory, with AUM growing 27 times in two years to approximately $27 billion, expanding from a few categories to seven categories tracked in our overview dashboard, including reinsurance and stocks.
Beyond the surface AUM figures, a more critical question is: how much of this capital is truly at work within DeFi? Approximately $2.7 billion of RWA tokens are actively deposited into various DeFi lending markets—about 10% of the $27 billion tokenized AUM. This 10% was nearly nonexistent a year ago. Composability—the ability of a tokenized asset to be used as collateral, borrowed, and cycled into yield strategies across different protocols and chains—can be said to be the most promising advantage of tokenization.

Source: dune.com/queries/6972565/?utmsource=share\&utmmedium=copy\&utm_campaign=query

Note: We count RWA tokens that have been deposited or provided to lending protocols—only including collateral and vault supply. We exclude borrowed amounts and stablecoins provided as lending liquidity to focus on RWA assets that are truly put into DeFi operations. All data is as of April 16, 2026.

Where the Approximately $2.7 Billion is Stored

Distributed across four platforms on Ethereum, Solana, and multiple L2s.

Source: dune.com/queries/7332367/?utmsource=share\&utmmedium=copy\&utm_campaign=query

• @Morpho ($957 million)—permissionless, has listed 41 types of RWA assets across 10 chains. Specialized curators like Gauntlet and Steakhouse manage the vaults, allocating capital to these markets and building structured leverage strategies on top of tokenized real-world assets.

• @aave (broader market) ($929 million)—Maple's syrup tokens are distributed across Plasma, Base, and Ethereum. Institutional credit flows permissionlessly to where lending economics are optimal.

• @kamino ($587 million)—the largest lending protocol and RWA platform on Solana. PRIME $315 million (HELOC lending yield), syrupUSDC $161 million, ONyc $71 million (reinsurance), USCC $18 million, plus the xStocks market (seven tokenized stocks totaling $21 million).

• Aave Horizon ($161 million)—Aave's permissioned RWA market for institutions. There are 256 addresses with an average holding of $1.5 million. USCC $105 million, USTB $46 million, VBILL $7 million, JAAA $3 million. Of the stablecoins, $124 million is actively borrowed, with a utilization rate of 77%.

• @0xfluid ($109 million)—reUSD $94 million (reinsurance), gold $12 million, syrup $2 million. Notably, this holds the reUSD from Re Protocol as collateral, which does not appear on other platforms.

Tokenized Does Not Equal Used

There is a significant divergence between the assets dominating tokenized AUM and those actually deposited as collateral in lending protocols. The two rankings are almost reversed.

Source: dune.com/queries/7327377/?utmsource=share\&utmmedium=copy\&utmcampaign=query
U.S. Treasury bonds account for 48.5% of tokenized AUM ($13.2 billion) but only 2% of DeFi deposits. Credit assets account for 17% of AUM but approximately 80% of deposits. Commodities account for 25.2% of AUM but almost only 1%.
Credit assets dominate because the math works out. @maplefinance's syrupUSDC yields about 6%, while T-Bills yield about 3.5%. When your collateral can earn 6% and you can borrow stablecoins at 3%, it creates a positive carry. Curators like @gauntletxyz build clear cyclical strategies on this basis: collateralize RWA, borrow funds, and buy more. This is a designed, risk-controlled leverage—also explaining why credit assets appear on all major lending platforms: $957 million on Morpho, $929 million on Aave, and $476 million on Kamino.

Source: dune.com/queries/6912382/?utmsource=share\&utmmedium=copy\&utm_campaign=query
In addition to existing categories, reinsurance is becoming a truly new composable asset class. @re Protocol's reUSD appears on multiple platforms—$96 million on Morpho (including $50 million from Pendle PT-reUSD) and $94 million on Fluid—while @onrefinance's ONyc accounts for $71 million on Kamino. In total, reinsurance corresponds to $324 million of tokenized AUM (1.2% of the total) and about $261 million of DeFi deposits (10% of the total), with approximately 80% of tokenized reinsurance actively deposited into lending protocols, the highest deposit rate among all asset classes.

Source: dune.com/queries/7332182/059a5dd3-7eae-4519-8504-35f3e9f32038?utmsource=share\&utmmedium=copy\&utm_campaign=query
Tokenized stocks are also entering DeFi: SPYx ($7.9 million on Morpho), @BackedFi's xStocks on Kamino (SPYx, TSLAx, QQQx, NVDAx, GOOGLx, MSTRx, AAPLx totaling $21 million), and deSPXA ($3.6 million). Although the amounts are small, the infrastructure is in place, and lending activities around stocks have begun to occur.
This divergence is enlightening. What tokenization rewards is security and familiarity—U.S. Treasury bonds are easy to understand, easy to regulate, transparent (NAV updates frequently and oracle pricing is simple), and attractive to institutional balance sheets. What composability rewards is a different logic: yield spreads and leverage economics.

Collateral Composition is Changing in Real Time

The dominance of high-yield credit assets may partly just be a matter of timing. Aave Horizon provides the clearest evidence.
When Horizon launched in August 2025, USCC—@SuperstateInc's Crypto Carry Fund—provided about 15% APY through its basis trading on crypto futures. This yield made it account for 93% of all RWA collateral. Although T-Bill products were launched, they attracted almost no interest.
Subsequently, as the basis spread narrowed, the yield of USCC compressed to about 4%, gradually aligning with T-Bill yields of 3% to 4%. The result was that the share of USCC collateral dropped from 93% to about 67%, while USTB surged from less than $1 million to $45.6 million within 30 days—a growth of 570%. As the yield gap narrows, the market is diversifying.

Source: https://dune.com/entropy_advisors/aave-horizon-rwa
This is important not just for Horizon. If credit yields continue to compress across the market—which is often the case in mature markets—then the collateral compositions across all platforms are likely to become more diversified. The first wave of dominant assets (high-yield credit) may not continue to dominate the next wave. Factors such as risk characteristics, regulatory acceptance, and settlement mechanisms will begin to become more important.
@pendle_fi also adds another dimension to this evolution. Its principal tokens (PTs)—which allow users to lock in fixed yields from RWA products—account for $58 million in Morpho deposits. Pendle also provides direct RWA markets for thBILL and mTBILL, incorporating yield curve trading into the composability stack. As more RWA products launch on Pendle, fixed-rate strategies will become another channel for RWA distribution.

Permissionless Access Drives Distribution

Maple Syrup is the clearest case. syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT are permissionless ERC-20 tokens—technically, they sit between stablecoins and RWA, as they are pegged 1:1 to USDC/USDT, but yield comes from institutional credit. We classify them as RWA because their underlying exposure is real-world lending. Anyone can mint, trade, or deposit them into any lending protocol. No KYC, no whitelisting, no partnerships required.
The result is that 98% of syrupUSDT on @Plasma and 99% of syrupUSDC on @base are actively deployed to Aave. Curators like Gauntlet independently built leveraged vaults without needing to coordinate with Maple. The scale of syrupUSDC on Kamino (Solana) also reached $161 million.

Source: dune.com/queries/7324965/?utmsource=share\&utmmedium=copy\&utm_campaign=query
Each new integration adds a bit of utility; utility attracts capital, and capital proves the rationale for more integrations. It is this flywheel effect that has naturally distributed $929 million across three chains.
This is important because distribution is widely recognized as the primary challenge in the industry. @centrifuge's Tokenization Outlook 2026 report shows that 86% of operators believe that expanding distribution for existing products is more important than launching new products. The case of Maple on Aave demonstrates that permissionless composability itself is a distribution channel.

Frontier: $1.85 Billion Tokenized, $13 Million Composable

Centrifuge showcases the opportunities and gaps in RWA. It is one of the largest tokenization platforms, with its institutional products' AUM nearing $2 billion: JTRSY (a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund) at $1.52 billion, JAAA (a tokenized AAA 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 is composable in DeFi.

Source: dune.com/queries/5534552/?utmsource=share\&utmmedium=copy\&utm_campaign=query
This gap is attributed to timing and design. The deRWA wrappers are permissionless but did not launch until September 2025. On the other hand, the permissioned designs of other mature products slowed the pace of integration. Liquidity remains thin.
But integration is accelerating. Resolv promises to deploy $100 million of JAAA on Horizon. Falcon Finance will use JAAA and JTRSY as collateral for USDf. Grove is deploying $250 million on Avalanche. LayerZero supports distribution across 165+ networks. Meanwhile, deSPXA—the DeFi-wrapped version of Centrifuge's S&P 500 fund—has already reached $3.6 million TVL and $7.9 million in DEX trading volume, showcasing early natural activity and the potential of the deRWA path: permissionless wrappers running in parallel with permissioned products aimed at institutions.

Three Key Conclusions

• Growth rate is more important than current scale. There are $2.7 billion in RWA deposits in the DeFi lending market—about 10% of the $27 billion tokenized AUM. But this $2.7 billion was nearly nonexistent a year ago. The absolute numbers are still small, but the growth rate is more important.

• Tokenized does not equal used. U.S. Treasury bonds account for 48.5% of tokenized AUM but only 2% of DeFi deposits. Credit assets account for 17% of AUM but 80% of deposits. Higher yields create positive carry sufficient to support leveraged cycles—credit yields above 6% are feasible, while 3.5% Treasury yields are not. However, as macro conditions change and yield spreads between different asset classes fluctuate, the composition of collateral will also adjust, with new assets and emerging categories (like reinsurance) continuously appearing.

• Permissionless access drives distribution. Maple's syrup tokens—a hybrid between RWA and stablecoins—have exceeded $1 billion in scale across Aave and Kamino on four chains. This token was designed for composability from the start, so the market has naturally combined it. Easily accessible assets will be adopted more quickly. Assets requiring whitelisting are also catching up, but at a slower pace.

All data cited in this article is freely available on Dune. You can start with the RWA Overview categorized by AUM or dive into the dashboards of various platforms: Morpho RWA, Aave Horizon, Maple on Aave, Centrifuge, Kamino RWA TVL. Data is as of April 16, 2026.