Decoding the RWA Market: The market size surged by 48% in the first half of the year, with ZKsync making a "comeback" as the second largest public chain.

Private credit (approximately 58% share) and U.S. Treasuries (approximately 31.2% share) constitute the absolute dual core of the market, collectively accounting for nearly 90% of the share.

Written by: Frank, PANews

In the first half of 2025, a relatively low-key track in the crypto world – the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) – ushered in an impressive explosive growth. As of June 6, the total market capitalization of the global RWA market has soared to $23.39 billion (excluding stablecoins), a massive jump of 48.9% from $15.7 billion at the beginning of the year. Behind this growth, private credit (about 58%) and US Treasuries (about 31.2%) make up the absolute core of the market, and together they account for nearly 90% of the market.

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 cryptocurrency ecosystem. RWA still has a long way to go before it can become a true "mainstream track."

Private Credit + U.S. Treasuries Account for Ninety Percent of the Market

Private credit has become the most popular asset type in the RWA market, with a total scale reaching 13.5 billion dollars, 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), allowing users to obtain credit limit loans of up to 85% of their home's value. According to its official data, HELOC has now become the largest non-bank home equity credit line in the United States, providing a total of over $15 billion in credit limit loans.

However, unlike other RWAs that are generally issued on generalized public chains, the Provenance blockchain adopted by Figure is a public but authoritative L1 blockchain. This consortium-like design allows for better management of Figure's RWA assets on the one hand, and on the other hand, it also blocks the possibility of such assets being widely circulated in the market. As a result, although Figure's RWA issuance assets have reached more than $10 billion, they are actually not highly correlated with the crypto market, and these assets are mainly on the chain in the form of collateralized notes, which so far do not have the attributes of trading and circulation. In terms of the general definition of RWA assets, Figure's RWA assets are an atypical type of RWA.

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

Originally launched on the Ethereum blockchain, the BUIDL fund has since expanded to multiple blockchain networks including Solana, Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon. Among them, the vast majority of the BUIDL fund's assets (about 93%) are still issued on Ethereum.

This RWA offers greater flexibility than traditional outright purchases of U.S. Treasuries, providing 24/7 liquidity. Traditional Treasury transactions can take days to complete. However, BUIDL is currently open to accredited investors, with a minimum investment threshold of $5 million, and the current number of holders is 75. In addition, BUIDL has launched a DeFi-compatible version, sBUIDL, which is an ERC-20 token that represents a 1:1 claim on the BUIDL fund. sBUIDL can interact with DeFi protocols such as Euler.

Apart from private credit and U.S. Treasury bonds, commodities rank as the third RWA asset class, primarily consisting of tokenized gold issued by institutions such as Paxos and Tether, with a current total market value 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, its market value of 74 billion dollars accounts for 55% (it should be noted that this percentage is relative to all assets issued on public chains, which is approximately 125.5 billion dollars, and assets issued on proprietary public chains like Figure are not included in this statistic).

Among them, the 2.7 billion USD assets issued by BUIDL constitute 36.48% of Ethereum, while others include tokenized gold such as PAXG and XAUT.

In the comparison of public chains, it is more surprising that ZKsync has become the second highest RWA public chain with $2.25 billion in asset issuance. ZKsync was able to achieve such a large number of RWA asset issuances mainly due to Tradable, an asset management company that has introduced web3 technology. Tradable allows institutions to initiate investment opportunities on their app and explain things like what the investment is for and what the transaction is about. Based on these investment opportunities, investors choose the investments they are interested in, such as the Fintech Senior Secured Loan, which raised $110 million with a 15% rate of return. Or a term loan to a leading law firm with a 15.5% return on $57 million. According to Tradable's official data, there are currently 34 assets online, with an average APY of 10%. But the company apparently lacks momentum in terms of external publicity and operations, and has only retweeted 2 news items on Twitter so far, has not actively published any original content, and the official news page is stuck in 2023 news.

In addition, by checking the contract information of Tradable, PANews found that these contracts are all non-open source contracts and do not interact with encrypted assets. All contracts show the token amount as zero. Therefore, from this perspective, there are certain doubts about the actual amount of RWA assets on the Tradable blockchain.

In addition, Stellar is the third-ranked network in the RWA market, which is quite an unexpected result. Currently, the issuance of RWA assets on this network is approximately $498 million, with the 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 around $770 million, of which 63% is issued on the Stellar chain.

Stellar, as an established public blockchain created in 2014, has gradually faded from the mainstream public blockchain 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 several contract institutions such as Franklin Templeton, Paxos, and Circle in the past year, which has allowed Stellar to surpass popular public blockchains like Solana in the RWA field, becoming the third-ranked RWA issuing blockchain. However, in terms of composition, Stellar's RWA asset issuance is relatively dependent on the issuance volume of Franklin, making it relatively singular.

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

Behind the Bright Data, Challenges Lurk in the RWA Market

From the data, the growth of the RWA market shows a considerable state. However, it seems that there are also some potential challenges behind this considerable growth.

First, the asset class is still mainly concentrated in private credit and U.S. Treasury securities. The data of leading private credit projects like Figure and Tradable is not transparent. Moreover, the RWA assets of Figure essentially only exist in an on-chain form, and most do not have trading attributes. From this perspective, such assets have not truly realized the benefits that blockchain technology can bring to traditional assets in terms of liquidity and transparency.

Secondly, in the field of government bonds, many products and stablecoins have similar issuance methods. In fact, interest-bearing stablecoins backed by U.S. Treasury bonds essentially provide 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. Currently, the main focus remains on the issuance methods of government bonds and private credit, which account for nearly 90%. The proportion of products such as commodities, stocks, and funds remains very low. The development of these types of assets is limited primarily due to challenges related to physical storage, legal compliance, costs, and other factors.

As of now, the total size of the RWA market is only 23.3 billion USD, which is far from the scale of the stablecoin market (236 billion USD), and is even less than the market capitalization of some newly issued public chain tokens. This scale is far from the market's imagination of a trillion-scale RWA. From the perspective of asset operation, the current RWA market is almost exclusively for institutions and big players, and there is a significant distance from the operational methods of the traditional crypto market. For ordinary investors, participating in the RWA track seems to still have certain difficulties, and RWA becoming a new opportunity for retail investors still has a long way to go.

Overall, the RWA market in the first half of 2025 has indeed delivered a nearly 50% surge in market capitalization, and the dual-headed pattern of private credit and US Treasuries is becoming increasingly clear. The potential of RWA is undeniable, but how to break through the current bottlenecks and achieve qualitative changes in transparency, liquidity, and ecosystem integration will be the key to determining whether it is a flash in the pan or the beginning of a new chapter in finance.