How Centrifuge is Making Tokenised RWAs Composable
The tokenised RWA market has reached $30 billion in distributed asset value, with $348 billion represented (this accounts for the RWA tokens using the blockchain as a recordkeeping layer) according to rwa.xyz.
However, just a handful of RWA tokens actually move through DeFi. The assets are on-chain, true, but the tokens sit in permissioned pools that can’t post as collateral, can’t enter AMMs, can’t be leveraged.
Centrifuge’s DeRWA layer is the most active attempt to close that gap. So far, $12.36M of $1.84B in Centrifuge’s institutional supply has been wrapped into composable form. That’s 0.65%. The whole point of putting real-world assets on-chain was composability with DeFi. Closing that gap means solving three problems at once: how RWAs settle on-chain, how permissioned tokens become composable, and how managers move capital across the result.
Centrifuge has been building solutions for all three. @Offerijns, Co-Founder & CTO of Centrifuge Labs, explained their approach to integrating RWAs into DeFi more succinctly:”
“You need a structure that enables the integration of those tokens into DeFi. Centrifuge launched what we call DeRWA (decentralised RWA), which are really products that enable a broader set of users to access the yield from these assets. Those tokens are freely transferable in DeFi and therefore allow much more composability.
Another aspect is liquidity. If you’re leveraging an asset like this, how do you actually ensure that you’re able to unwind when it’s needed?
That combination is starting to create more useful assets and is actually very linked to the vault primitive, because vaults enable creating market structures around these tokenised assets that integrate them into DeFi. That’s really why Centrifuge got into vault standards in the first place.”
At the moment, their V3 stack runs $1.84B in TVL across 8 production pools, with +$287M in 30-day net flow. You’d likely ask: Are all these funds tokenised? Yes, they are. Are they all usable in DeFi now? No, not all of them,
That’s because tokenisation is the easy half, really; making tokenised assets actually usable is the hard half. And Centrifuges' answer to the hard part is in three pieces that work together as a stacked vault:
- ERC-7540, the async vault standard they co-authored, solves how RWAs settle on-chain.
- DeRWA, their wrapper layer, solves the problem of how permissioned tokens become composable.
- The Onchain Portfolio Manager in v3.2 solves how managers move across all of it atomically.
Traditional finance already works in nested layers. ETFs holding CLO notes holding loan portfolios. Centrifuge replicates this pattern onchain through stacked vaults, where each layer is a composable vault. And we have seen how successful this can be with the deSPXA.
So I built a dashboard to track the DeRWA rollout, with all the data, methodology, and reconciliation logic published on the Centrifuge RWA Terminal. Specifically, it shows how deSPXA has now run through the full stack, giving us enough data to ask whether any of this actually works.
Why ERC-4626 doesn’t work for RWAs
The place to start is settlement, because nothing else in the stack matters if settlement is broken.
Deposit USDC into Aave, and it clears in one block, instantly. However, when you deposit into a tokenised Treasury fund, you wait. Behind the scenes, a fund administrator has to process your request, calculate the fund’s price for the day, and then issue your shares. That can take hours or days. ERC-4626, the vault standard every DeFi protocol speaks, assumes the first kind of deposit, the instant one. So the moment a real fund tries to plug into a 4626 contract, the standard breaks
ERC-7540 is a fix, co-written by Centrifuge, that solves the problem by adding a two-step flow to the standard itself. You call requestDeposit, wait for off-chain settlement, then call deposit to receive your shares.
Redemptions work the same way in reverse. This also means async is no longer a bug every integrator has to hack around, it's part of the interface the contract declares up front. But standardising settlement only solves half of the problem.
A 7540-compliant vault still can’t enter a Uniswap pool if the token itself refuses to transfer to non-whitelisted addresses. Which brings us to the second piece.
The wrapper that gets around compliance
Tokenised securities carry transfer restrictions for good reason. KYC, whitelists, counterparty gating. These are what keep the issuer legal, and they’re not going anywhere. The problem is that they’re also exactly what kills composability.
You can’t post a whitelisted token as collateral if the liquidator isn’t on the whitelist, and you can’t LP a token that refuses to transfer to a random AMM contract.
DeRWA is Centrifuge’s way around this. It wraps the permissioned token and issues a freely transferable version to users who meet the underlying eligibility criteria, preserving the same exposure and NAV but with transfer logic that behaves like any other ERC-20.
Whether that actually produces adoption, though, turns out to be a different question, but the data makes the answer visible:
Wrap ratio measures how much of the underlying institutional pool has crossed into composable form, and the spread is what’s interesting. deSPXA has wrapped 97% of its pool. deJTRSY has wrapped 0.18%. This means the wrapper itself isn’t what drives adoption. The asset has to be designed for DeFi from day one, true, but the venues to use it have to actually be live. Something pulls the supply through when both conditions are met.
Looking at deSPXA specifically, those things are venues for composability.
How deSPXA was deployed across three venues
deSPXA is the DeFi-wrapped version of SPXA, a tokenised S&P 500 index fund run by Janus Henderson under an S&P Dow Jones license. It’s the only DeRWA token with a full venue stack live right now. It has three integrations that do the heavy lifting on composability, plus market makers and oracle infrastructure stacked behind them:
Venue I: Aerodrome.
This is the underlying decentralised exchange that supports the deSPXA token. Since the announcement, the USDC-deSPXA pair has accumulated $3.64M in liquidity, and the pool has been clearing a few hundred trades a day with peak days above $1M in volume.
The yield on Aerodrome isn’t really the point. What actually matters is that you can buy or sell S&P 500 exposure at any hour without waiting for NAV settlement.
That liquidity is also what makes the lending markets downstream possible, because no lending protocol accepts a token as collateral without that exit door. The DEX listing had to come before the lending markets could.
Venue II: Morpho.
Lending markets are the second and third integrations, starting with Morpho, where Steakhouse Financial curates a dedicated deSPXA/USDC market. The market launched on April 2, 2026, and the parameters are interesting.
With utilisation already at 90.6% on the deSPXA/USDC market, the interest rate curve kinks sharply above 90% and climbs toward 24% at full utilisation, and the market has been pressed against that kink for most of its short life.
That is active borrower demand. People are paying a 6.45% borrow APY to hold leveraged S&P 500 exposure on-chain, suppliers are earning 5.83%, and the spread is what you’d expect from a market-clearing real demand against real supply rather than one being subsidised into existence by curator rewards or external incentives.
What makes the demand interesting to look at is the conservatism in the rest of the design. Here’s what I mean: LLTV sits at 77%, meaning a holder can borrow up to 77 cents of USDC per dollar of deSPXA posted, but the current collateral ratio across the market is 197%, which leaves a 34% buffer before the S&P would have to fall to trigger liquidations.
Venue III: Euler.
That third venue is Euler, where Clearstar curates a separate RWA market with $11.79K supplied so far. The supply is small, but the product is different in a way that matters: Euler’s Multiply strategies let you take a leveraged long or short on deSPXA in one transaction.
Synthetic short S&P 500 exposure already exists on dYdX and Synthetix, sourced from oracle-priced perps. What’s new about this is that the position is collateralised by an actual S&P 500 fund share through deSPXA, rather than a synthetic perpetual. That’s a primitive that didn’t exist on-chain before this stack.
Put the three venues together, and they stack cleanly for users: mint deSPXA, LP it on Aerodrome, post the position on Morpho, borrow USDC, redeploy. The underlying fund never settles in the middle of any of it, which is the whole point of composability. And the TVL curve shows how hard that actually pulls supply through the wrapper.
Managing portfolios across chains
Once you can do all of this with one token, managers immediately want to do it across assets, venues, and chains, all in a single atomic operation. The manual version, moving capital between Aave, Morpho, and other DeFi venues by hand, takes minutes and multiple transactions, with each one a point of failure.
The Onchain Portfolio Manager in v3.2 is what closes that gap. Swaps, bridges, deposits, and leveraged loops run as a single atomic operation across the chains Centrifuge supports, with NAV accounting unified across all of them, including capital in flight between chains.
An asset issued through Centrifuge today can be priced, distributed, wrapped, traded, leveraged, and rebalanced across those chains on audited rails. And judging by the +$337M 30-day net flow, institutional allocators are scaling into it fast, even while the DeFi-composable side is still being built out.
There are two ways to read the numbers.
The first is sceptical.
Centrifuge’s largest pool by a wide margin is JTRSY at $1.43B, and its DeRWA wrapper holds 0.18% of that pool. JAAA is the second biggest at $403M, and its wrapper is 1.47%, which is real but small. Across every institutional pool except one, the composable surface is in the low single digits or below. If the flagship Treasury fund can’t get composable, the whole thesis looks shaky.
The second is constructive. deSPXA is the only asset that has actually run the full playbook, and the result is a 97% wrap ratio, 90% lending utilisation, zero bad debt in the Morpho market’s first 26 days, and a $3.64M DEX pair clearing real volume. Those are the numbers you get when the asset was designed for DeFi from day one, and the venues it needs to live in are actually live.
What’s unresolved is whether the deSPXA pattern generalises.
Is “DeFi-native from day one” a requirement, or does it just go first? If Centrifuge can get deJTRSY from 0.18% to even 5% without redesigning JTRSY itself, they’ve proven the pattern transfers.
If not, deSPXA stays an outlier, and the thesis narrows from “RWAs on-chain become composable” to “fund managers willing to design-for-DeFi get composability.” That’s a much smaller claim. A true one, possibly, but much smaller.
Issuance puts an asset on-chain, but it doesn’t make it useful. I do believe the infrastructure for the second step now exists. The rest of the work is about extending the pattern to more assets, and the dashboard is where we’ll watch whether it does.
A footnote on the data. Every figure in this piece uses on-chain reads as the authoritative source, with the indexer as a fallback and a reconciliation layer that flags divergence when the two disagree. Full methodology, contract addresses, and reconciliation logs are on the dashboard.
The dashboard is maintained by @DatumLabs.