Stablecoins are only a fraction of what the real-world asset, or RWA, sector could become.
According to new research from Standard Chartered Bank released Wednesday, the non-stablecoin RWA market could see significant growth over the coming years.
“The key lesson from tokenisation efforts so far is that it is pointless to tokenise an asset simply for the sake of tokenising it,” Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered Bank, said in the report.
“The tokenised asset needs to be cheaper, quicker to settle, and/or create access for more investors than its offchain equivalent.”
The non-stablecoin RWA tokenisation market has reached around $23 billion, about 10% of the size of the stablecoin market.
Currently, this market is dominated by private credit and US Treasury debt.
The tokenisation of US Treasury debt has gained a firm foothold, with the market reaching $7 billion and attracting major traditional finance players, including BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.
Opportunities
The report identifies onchain private credit as the largest RWA sub-sector, with a market of $13 billion. Most of this comes from Figure, a loan marketplace that simplifies the loan verification and approval process.
Figure launched on Provenance, a blockchain that focuses only on RWAs. Provenance leads all chains in terms of RWA tokenisation amounts.
“Private equity tokenisation, which has been slow to take off so far, may benefit from similar onchain positives to private credit,” Kendrick said.
“We would expect a successful platform to quickly catch up with (and keep pace with) the successful private credit platforms.”
Other non-stablecoin asset classes have experienced significantly slower growth, with a market of about $1.5 billion. The majority of this figure comes from gold-backed stablecoins offered by Paxos and Tether. Meanwhile, progress for onchain equities and other commodities has been extremely slow, according to the report.
“We suspect that [the slow progress] is because commodities like gold are already available to investors in easily accessible, liquid forms like ETFs. In this context, we think efforts to bring less liquid commodities onchain are likely to be more successful,” said Kendrick.
“In line with the lessons learned so far, we expect private equity and liquid offchain commodities to be the next growth areas for non-stablecoin tokenisation.”
There are multiple successful RWA projects that have launched tokens. Ondo Finance, a project with multiple offerings ranging from US Treasury debt to equity tokenisation, has a market value of over $2.3 billion with a total value of deposits at over $1.3 billion.
Maple Finance, a project primarily focused on institutional lending, recently surpassed a total value of deposits of $2 billion, leading to an almost 50% increase in token price within the past 30 days. The token’s current market value is over $530 million.
