Tokenizing a real-world asset is easy. Using it is the hard part.

A preview of our new report, out Monday.

Putting a real-world asset on-chain is easy enough.

Right now there are about $38 billion of tokenised Treasuries, credit funds and money-market shares sitting on Ethereum, and issuing them is close to a solved problem. The hard part, and the part that actually matters, is what you can do with them once they are there.

Over June and July, we set out to measure exactly that. This is a preview of what we found. The full report lands Monday.

A real-world asset is only worth what you can do with it

Think about how this works in traditional finance.

If you own Treasury bills, you can borrow against them by the afternoon. If you own a building, you can remortgage it and pull cash out without ever selling it. That reusability, the ability to post an asset, pledge it, and put it to work, is most of what makes owning a good asset worthwhile.

The people building this on-chain agree. As Centrifuge's CEO put it at the launch of Aave Horizon, "The true potential of RWAs isn't just in tokenisation; it's in what you can do once those assets are onchain." However, what nobody has really answered with data is what type of tokenized assets actually behave that way: can you post it as collateral, borrow against it at a fair rate, and get your money back out when you want it?

That property has a name: composability, and it is the whole subject of the report.

$38 billion on-chain, and almost none of it working

Of that roughly $38 billion in tokenised real-world assets, under $2 billion is actually being used as collateral anywhere in DeFi.

The rest just sits there, earning its own yield and doing nothing else. The figure everyone quotes, the total value tokenised, tells you the assets exist. It says almost nothing about whether they work.

That gap is why we built the Datum Labs RWA Terminal. It currently tracks two venues on Ethereum where tokenised RWAs are genuinely posted and borrowed against: Aave Horizon and Morpho's RWA markets.

At the end of July, the total on-chain value of the RWA tokens we track was $5.4 billion, and those two venues held about $523 million of RWAs posted as collateral between them. Against a $38 billion market, that is the small slice genuinely in play, and over two months it did three things worth writing about.

• USCC, the Bitwise Crypto Carry Fund, was redeemed from 10.5 million tokens down to about 1 million over the two months, close to a 90% wind-down. Holders left at full value, with no fire sale. And the reason is visible off-chain as well: the trade the fund runs has paid less than a plain US Treasury since February, so there was little point staying in it. This is composability's exit leg working exactly as it should.
• Ripple's RLUSD, the largest single reserve on Aave Horizon, drained about $54 million over two weeks in July, then took a single deposit that put it back, and then some, within days. Money that can move in and out that freely, at institutional size, is exactly what you want to see from an asset that is supposed to be usable.
• This is the one that stopped us. On Morpho, from the moment our daily borrower data started indexing, at least one loan sat past its liquidation line every single day for the entire month, and nobody moved to close it. In ordinary lending, an underwater loan is supposed to be liquidated almost instantly. For a full month, it wasn't. We are holding the explanation for the report, but it points straight at the one part of composability that is not finished, and it has everything to do with what the collateral on that venue really is.

So, are tokenised assets composable yet?

After two months of data, the honest answer is a qualified yes, and the qualifications are the entire story.

Getting your money out works well; USCC and RLUSD both proved it. Getting the collateral to do real work is early, and on the busiest venue it mostly sits idle. And making it safe, when the collateral is hard to sell in a hurry, is not solved yet. Each of those is a finding with numbers behind it, and each one cuts against a tidy "RWAs are booming" narrative in a different way.

That is what makes it worth reading rather than cheering. The data both supports and complicates the case for tokenised assets, and we let it do both.

What's in Monday's report

The full piece is the second in our monthly series on composable real-world assets. It has the complete June and July data set, a chart for each finding, and more than twenty outside sources, several of which argue directly against our read.

If you care whether tokenised assets can do more than simply exist on a ledger, it is worth the read when it drops Monday. We will share the link here when it goes live.

The State of Composable Real-World Assets: June and July 2026. Datum Labs, Monday.