Article reprinted from: NingNing
Data source: http://RWA.xyz
The Real Scale of Total Assets in the RWA Track
Institutional research reports on the trillion-dollar scale RWA track, excluding stablecoin projects, meaning it only includes the strict definition of RWA assets like private credit, US Treasury bonds, commodities, institutional alternative funds, non-US bonds, corporate bonds, and stocks, amounted to $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 US Treasury bonds, and a significant portion of the underlying assets of the decentralized stablecoin USDS (formerly DAI) is also short-term US Treasury bonds. Their mechanisms are similar to ONDO's USDY and Elixir's deUSD, except that the issuers of USDT/USDC, Tether, and Circle do not distribute the underlying asset income from US Treasury bonds to users.
Personally, I believe the logic of this statement is sound, 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 of the RWA Track
At the beginning of 2023, when Professor Meng Yan @myanTokenGeek initiated a big discussion on RWA on Weibo, at that time, in the low-interest environment on the chain (with stablecoin interest on AAVE long-term below 2%), tokenized US Treasury bonds were the hottest topic in the RWA track and occupied an absolute share of the RWA market.
However, less than two years have passed, and the market landscape of the RWA track has undergone tremendous changes.
With Figure Markets, which raised $60 million in Series A financing led by Jump Crypto, Pantera Capital, and Lightspeed Faction, entering the private credit segment, its rapidly expanding business this year not only offsets the decline in the same field for Maple, Centrifuge, Goldfinch, Curve, and TrueFi, but also pulls the scale of private credit to $9.40B, far exceeding the $2.60B total asset scale of tokenized US Treasury bonds.
RWA Asset Issuance in 2024
From the attached figure, it can be seen that in 2024, the monthly RWA asset issuance scale for the top three is stablecoins, tokenized US Treasury bonds, and private credit.
In other words, to find the most promising investment targets in the RWA track, one should look within these three sub-sectors.
Chain Distribution of RWA Assets
As expected, Ethereum wins 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 accumulated in the previous cycle and the tokenized US Treasury bond assets issued by BlackRock and Franklin Templeton.
Solana ranks fourth, with RWA categories primarily consisting of USDC and USDT, in addition to Ondo's USDY with a scale of $107.57M. During this cycle, Solana had great success on the To C front but needs to work harder 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 issuing entities are very rich, but due to the recent difficulties in the development of the Avalanche chain, its total scale is only $97.87M.
RWA Track Investment Targets
--Beta Targets: Leading sub-sector entities, such as SKY (formerly MakerDAO) in the tokenized US Treasury bond field, Ondo Finance, Figure Markets in private credit, Spiko in non-US bond tokenization, and Securitize in institutional funds.
--Alpha Targets: DeUSD, a decentralized stablecoin based on tokenized US Treasury bonds issued in collaboration with BlackRock; Curve, the pricing market for RWA stablecoins; and Goldfish, among others, which are experiencing restorative growth in private credit scale.
Of course, Alpha targets are not limited to the above; the search principle is still based on 'disruptive innovation' or 'exponential growth.'
