CoinShares Report: The Significant Growth of Equities Issued on Blockchain

Roughly $2.2B of equity exposure has been tokenised on-chain. The global equity market is above $100T. Anyone using the first number to argue that tokenisation has arrived is overreaching, and anyone using it to argue the market is irrelevant is missing the second-order data.

A tokenised real-world asset is a claim on a conventional asset, a Treasury fund, a share, a gold holding, issued as a transferable token on a public blockchain. The relevant distinction is not technical but functional. Once a claim is transferable, it can be posted as collateral, traded against other assets, or used to gain leveraged exposure, without going back to the issuer. Issuance is the easy part. Usage is the test.

The second CoinShares and Token Terminal report applies that test. Between Q2 ’25 and Q2 ’26, total crypto assets deposits fell by roughly 15%, reflecting both withdrawals and lower crypto asset prices. Over the same window, real-world asset deposits across lending platforms and decentralised exchanges rose from $2.3B to $7.4B. On spot decentralised exchanges the pattern repeats: aggregate volumes, overwhelmingly crypto-native, fell approximately 70%, while real-world asset spot volumes rose roughly 220% from a much smaller base.

An asset class that grows while its host ecosystem contracts is not being carried by the cycle.

Within that picture, tokenised equities are the fastest-growing category on holder count, substantially outpacing institutional products over the past year. The driver is access. Lower minimum investment sizes admit a broader set of investors, so the holder base expands even when capital per holder remains small.

Average wallet balance, calculated as assets under management divided by on-chain holders, separates the segments cleanly. Products issued through xStocks show balances consistent with broad retail participation. BlackRock’s BUIDL shows average balances in the tens of millions of dollars. Wallets are not people, so the metric is directional rather than exact, but the gap is wide enough to be informative.

Institutional capital, meanwhile, concentrates in collateral that pays. On-chain yields currently range from about 3.2% to 5.5%, with tokenised Treasury funds at the lower end and private credit, lending markets, vaults and funding rate strategies progressively higher. Investors prefer collateral that keeps earning while it supports borrowing, which is why deposits cluster in yield-bearing assets on established venues such as Aave, Morpho and Kamino, and why almost 70% of real-world asset deposits sit on lending venues built on Ethereum.

The venues facilitating all of this are not yet capturing it. Application revenues declined year on year across both lending and trading, because real-world asset activity remains small next to crypto-native markets. Hyperliquid generates substantially more application revenue than any other venue, helped by derivatives economics where high trading frequency compounds into recurring fees, and it competes at both the application and settlement layer rather than paying rent to a third-party chain. Morpho, the second-largest lending platform, currently runs without a protocol-level take rate.

Trading venues also carry the highest revenue multiples in the peer group, on fully diluted market capitalisation. That is a market pricing capital velocity and operating leverage, the same logic applied to exchange businesses in public equities.

Tokenised stocks today resemble USD stablecoins in 2019: small relative to the addressable market, growing quickly, and dependent on infrastructure that is still being built. The comparison describes a stage of development, not a guaranteed outcome. What is different from 2019 is that the data is on-chain and auditable, which means advisors can track whether the trend holds rather than waiting to be told.

Read the full report on CoinShares.com

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