Castle Labs report: The RWA market size has reached 28.2 billion dollars, but the DeFi penetration rate is only about 10%

Castle Labs released an RWA industry report stating that the on-chain tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) has reached $28.2 billion, an increase of about 500% compared to early 2025, with a peak of $31.8 billion.

Currently, tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds and money market funds remain the largest category, with a scale of about $17 billion, accounting for nearly 60% of the entire RWA market, among which BlackRock BUIDL and Hashnote USYC have both surpassed $3 billion in scale. The report also points out that tokenized stocks have become one of the fastest-growing RWA sub-sectors, growing over 170% this year, significantly higher than the approximately 60% growth rate of tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds.

Castle Labs believes that the expansion of stablecoins, the entry of institutional funds, and the advancement of regulatory frameworks such as CLARITY and MiCA are driving the continuous on-chain migration of traditional financial assets. However, the current industry's biggest bottleneck has shifted from asset issuance to redemption mechanisms and DeFi composability. Currently, of the approximately $28.2 billion in on-chain RWA, only about $3 billion has entered DeFi, with a penetration rate of about 10%.