Article Reprinted From: NingNing
Data Source: http://RWA.xyz
The Real Scale of Total Assets in the RWA Track
The trillion-dollar scale RWA track in institutional research reports, excluding stablecoin projects, includes only the strict definition of RWA assets like private credit, U.S. Treasury bonds, commodities, institutional alternative funds, non-U.S. bonds, corporate bonds, and stocks, totaling $13.55B as of December 1.
The total asset scale of stablecoin projects is $192.78B.
Of course, RWA enthusiasts can argue that about 90% of the underlying assets of USDT/USDC stablecoins are short-term U.S. Treasury bonds, and a significant portion of the underlying assets of the decentralized stablecoin USDS (formerly DAI) are also short-term U.S. Treasury bonds. Their mechanisms are similar to ONDO's USDY and Elixir's deUSD, except that the issuers Tether and Circle do not allocate the underlying U.S. Treasury bond yields to users.
Personally, I believe there is no issue with the logic of this statement, so in a broad sense, the real scale of total assets in the RWA track should be $206.33B, having achieved 20% of the trillion-dollar scale target.
Asset Scale Distribution in the RWA Track
At the beginning of 2023, when Professor Meng Yan @myanTokenGeek initiated a major discussion on RWA in the Chinese community, during a time of low interest rates on-chain (where the stablecoin interest on AAVE was consistently below 2%), tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds were the star of the RWA track, occupying an absolute share of the RWA market.
However, less than two years have passed, and the market landscape of the RWA track has undergone significant changes.
With the entry of Figure Markets, which raised $60 million in Series A funding led by Jump Crypto, Pantera Capital, and Lightspeed Faction, its rapidly expanding business this year not only offset the decline in the same field by Maple, Centrifuge, Goldfinch, Curve, and TrueFi, but also pulled the scale of private credit to $9.40B, far exceeding the total asset scale of $2.60B for tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds.
Issuance of RWA Assets in 2024
From the attached chart, it can be seen that the monthly issuance scale of RWA assets in 2024 has stablecoins, tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds, and private credit as the top three.
In other words, if you are looking for the most promising investment targets in the RWA track, you should look for them within these three sub-sectors.
Chain Distribution of RWA Assets
As expected, Ethereum overwhelmingly dominates with a market share of 76.51%.
Stellar ranks second with 9 RWA products totaling $245.58M, aided by WisdomTree.
Polygon ranks third due to its native stablecoin assets and the tokenized U.S. Treasury bond assets issued by BlackRock and Franklin Templeton that accumulated in the previous cycle.
Solana ranks fourth, with RWA categories primarily consisting of USDC and USDT, and additionally, Ondo with a scale of $107.57M for USDY. During this cycle, Solana achieved great success on the To C front but needs to work on the To B side.
Avalanche is very active in RWA and has initiated and organized the RWA Alliance. Therefore, its on-chain RWA categories and issuance subjects are very rich, but due to the recent developmental difficulties of the Avalanche chain, the overall scale is only $97.87M.
Investment Targets in the RWA Track
--Beta Targets: Leading firms in sub-sectors, such as SKY (formerly MakerDAO) in the tokenized U.S. Treasury bond field, Ondo Finance, Figure Markets in private credit, Spiko in non-U.S. bond tokenization, and Securitize in institutional funds, etc.
--Alpha Targets: Elixir, a decentralized stablecoin based on tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds in collaboration with BlackRock, the pricing market for RWA stablecoins Curve, and the recovery growth of private credit like Goldfish, etc.
Of course, Alpha targets are not limited to the above few; the search principle is still 'disruptive innovation' or 'exponential growth'.
