Not every tokenized asset is equally onchain. Bonds are by far the largest tokenized asset category with $15.2 billion in market cap. But only about 5% of that supply is being used in DeFi. Precious metals look similar: they’re onchain, but mostly just sitting there. Smaller categories look different. Reinsurance tokens have 84% of their supply deployed in DeFi, while private credit sits at 33%. This makes sense: The categories with the highest DeFi usage were built for DeFi from the start, through protocols like Nexus Mutual and Maple Finance. Much of what gets called “tokenization” today is actually closer to digitization: moving records onto blockchains without unlocking much more new functionality. This matters because one of the core value propositions of onchain financial systems is composability.
