Tokenised Treasuries Are Half the Real-World Asset Market and Turned Over 0.006 Percent of Supply

Tokenised real-world assets, meaning off-chain instruments such as government bills, funds and shares represented by tokens on a blockchain, totalled $34.5bn at the end of August, according to a report published by the analytics firm Dune on Wednesday and covered by The Defiant. The headline number keeps growing. What the report measures alongside it is how much of that stock actually changes hands, and the answer is close to nothing.

Tokenised Treasury funds, the largest single category, make up about half the $34.5bn. Over the month of August those funds turned over 0.006 percent of their supply, on Dune's figures. That is a holding, not a market: the tokens exist, they sit in wallets, and they are redeemed or held rather than traded.

The small slice does the trading

Equities are the opposite case. Tokenised shares account for roughly 8 percent of the real-world asset market by value, and generated 93 percent of spot trading volume in the period Dune examined. A category one twelfth the size of the whole is doing almost all of the transacting.

That split is not a surprise once you separate what the two products are for. A tokenised money market fund is a yield-bearing cash instrument, bought to hold and increasingly used as collateral; there is no reason for its holder to trade it, and the fund's returns accrue whether the token moves or not. A tokenised share is bought because someone wants exposure to a price that moves, at hours when the underlying exchange is shut.

Why the distinction matters for the numbers everyone quotes

Total value locked and outstanding supply are the figures the tokenisation industry reports, and both are measures of stock. Volume is a measure of use. Dune's report is one of the few public datasets that puts the two side by side across categories, and the gap it shows is roughly two orders of magnitude between the largest category by size and the largest by activity.

The practical consequence is about liquidity. A $17bn category that turns over 0.006 percent of itself in a month has no continuous secondary market to speak of, which means the exit for a holder is redemption with the issuer rather than a sale to another buyer. That is fine while issuers redeem promptly. It is a different risk profile from an instrument you can sell into a book.

What would change the picture

Two things would move Treasury turnover: wider acceptance of tokenised funds as margin at trading venues, which creates transfers rather than trades, and secondary venues willing to quote two-way prices in them. Both are underway at various firms, but neither shows up in an August turnover figure of 0.006 percent.

For equities the question runs the other way. Their share of volume is 93 percent off a small base, so the number that matters next is whether the base grows, or whether trading in tokenised shares stays concentrated in a handful of tickers during a handful of hours.