According to CoinDesk, tokenized versions of U.S. Treasuries have grown nearly seven-fold in 2023 as competition between investment offerings and blockchain venues intensified. Real-world asset monitoring platform RWA.xyz reported that the tokenized Treasury market surged to $698 million as of Monday from around $100 million at the start of the year. The expansion was driven by new entrants into the space and growth from existing platforms, according to Charlie You, co-founder of RWA.xyz.
Existing protocols such as Ondo Finance, Maple, and Backed experienced significant growth over the past few months, while new protocols launched in September, including Tradeteq and TrueFi's Adatp3r offering, attracted $4.5 million and $8.5 million deposits, respectively. Ethereum (ETH) recently overtook the Stellar (XLM) network in the value of Treasury tokens on-chain, and later entrants Polygon (MATIC) and Solana (SOL) attracted over $40 million of assets combined. This indicates a diversifying blockchain landscape for tokenized assets, according to You.
Permissionless yield-bearing stablecoin alternatives have emerged as a new avenue for tokenization, with Ondo Finance debuting its USDY token and Mountain Protocol unveiling USDM. These offerings differ from leading stablecoins, such as Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC, as they directly pass on the yield earned from the backing assets. Tokenization of Treasuries has led the effort to put real-world assets on blockchain rails, with crypto investors seeking these offerings to capture higher returns amid soaring global interest rates and declining decentralized finance yields. Investment firm 21.co predicts that the market for tokenized assets could grow to $10 trillion by the end of the decade.
