Data source: http://RWA.xyz
The true scale of total assets in the RWA sector.
In institutional research reports, the RWA sector is estimated to be in the trillions, excluding stablecoin projects, meaning it only includes private credit, US debt, commodities, institutional alternative funds, non-US debt, corporate bonds, and stocks in a strict sense, with a total asset scale of $13.55B as of December 1.
The total asset scale of stablecoin projects is $192.78B.
Of course, RWA enthusiasts might argue that approximately 90% of the underlying assets of USDT/USDC stablecoins are short-term US debt, and a significant portion of the underlying assets of the decentralized stablecoin USDS (formerly DAI) is also short-term US debt. Their mechanisms are similar to that of ONDO's USDY and Elixir's deUSD, except that the issuers of USDT/USDC, Tether and Circle, do not distribute the underlying asset US debt earnings to users.
Personally, I believe the logic of this statement is sound, so the broad sense of the true scale of total assets in the RWA sector should be $206.33B, already achieving 20% of the trillion-dollar scale target.
Asset scale distribution in the RWA sector.
At the beginning of 2023, Teacher Meng Yan @myanTokenGeek initiated a major discussion on RWA in Zhongchuan. At that time, in an on-chain low-interest environment (where stablecoin interest on AAVE was below 2% for a long time), US debt tokenization was the hottest topic in the RWA sector and held an absolute share of the RWA market.
However, in less than two years, the market landscape of the RWA sector has undergone significant changes.
With Figure Markets joining the private credit niche, having 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 similar businesses like Maple, Centrifuge, Goldfinch, Curve, and TrueFi, but also increased the scale of private credit to $9.40B, far exceeding the total asset scale of US debt tokenization at $2.60B.
RWA asset issuance situation in 2024.
From the attached chart, it can be seen that the top three monthly RWA asset issuance scales in 2024 are stablecoins, US debt tokenization, and private credit.
In other words, if one is looking for the most promising investment targets in the RWA sector, they should look into these three sub-sectors.
Chain distribution of RWA assets.
Barring any surprises, Ethereum will dominate with a market share of 76.51%.
Stellar ranks second with a total scale of $245.58M across 9 RWA products, aided by WisdomTree.
Polygon ranks third due to the native stablecoin assets and the US debt tokenization assets issued by BlackRock and Franklin Templeton that were accumulated in the previous cycle.
Solana ranks fourth, with RWA categories mainly consisting of USDC and USDT, along with Ondo's $107.57M USDY. In this cycle, Solana has been very successful in the To C aspect, but needs to make efforts in the To B aspect.
Avalanche is very active in RWA, having initiated and organized the RWA Alliance. Therefore, its on-chain RWA categories and issuing entities are very rich, but due to the recent development issues on the Avalanche chain, the overall scale is only $97.87M.
Investment targets in the RWA sector.
--Beta Target: Leading players in sub-sectors, such as SKY (formerly MakerDAO) in the field of US debt tokenization, Ondo Finance, Figure Markets in the private credit sector, Spiko for non-US debt tokenization, and Securitize for institutional funds, etc.
--Alpha Targets: Elixir, in collaboration with BlackRock, issues a decentralized stablecoin deUSD based on tokenized US debt, along with Curve for pricing markets for RWA stablecoins, and Goldfish with a recovering scale in private credit, etc.
Of course, Alpha targets are not limited to the above, and the search principle should still focus on 'disruptive innovation' or 'exponential growth.'
