It’s been 4 months since I published research on why tokenized US Treasuries took off and how BlackRock was future-proofing its asset management business. What has been happening in the meantime in this tokenization vertical?
Well in short it has grown 100% YTD. And here are the 3 key trends about its growth:
Out of the top 3 tokenized asset classes, tokenized US Treasuries growth outperformed peers by a wide margin
Different flavours of tokenized US Treasuries are taking shape - institutional vs crypto-native focused
Instead of high yield and low fees, distribution is king.
Let’s look at these in detail.
Tokenized US Treasuries Outperformance
Tokenized cash or stablecoins are the biggest tokenized asset group by orders of magnitude. You can read more about the history and breakdown of the category here.
Let’s zoom in on their numbers. Below shows stablecoin growth since 2021 according to DefiLlama.
It has grown from $130B to $168B today, almost 30% YTD growth. For an asset class that is over $100B in size, that is pretty impressive.
According to Coinbase’s Q2 State of Crypto report, the top asset sectors, excluding stablecoins, are tokenized US Treasuries and Commodities. See chart below.
Tokenized commodities mostly consist of tokenized gold and have more or less stayed flat according to 21.co. It was at $950M at the start of 2024, and it is now at around $1B, an increase of 4%.
In comparison, tokenized US Treasuries has been growing much faster.
From $870M at start of 2024 to $1.68B (excluding double-counting) as of 19th Aug 2024, the sector grew by 100% in 8 months, outpacing even tokenized cash, the only established meaningful adoption use case for tokenization.
So what do these data point towards?