Electric Capital released a research report on Monday cataloging 501 different sources of real-world yields and cross-referencing them with tokenized assets that have meaningful on-chain traction today.
The venture found that only 34 of these yield sources have an on-chain presence of more than $50 million, and they are concentrated in familiar areas such as U.S. government bonds, private credit, corporate bonds, and non-U.S. sovereign debt.
The remaining 93% fall into seven groups defined by what is holding back tokenization, from legal structure challenges for asset-backed securities to real-world integration hurdles for products and computing infrastructure.
Distribution is the bottleneck
Perhaps the report’s sharpest point concerns distribution. Of the 35 non-stablecoin RWA stocks with yields above $50 million, only two have more than 2,000 holders. Part of that is by design, but BlackRock’s BUIDL requires a minimum of $5 million. This data highlights how most tokenized assets rely on a small number of large-scale deployers and vault administrators.
The report highlights that Centrifuge’s JAAA, a tokenized AAA CLO that held $743 million at the time of data collection, lost 44% of its value in a single day, March 9, after $327 million was redeemed in a single transaction via Sky’s Grove protocol.
BlackRock’s BUIDL faces a similar situation. The top 10 holders control 98% of the supply, and those holders are mainly other protocols (Ethena, Ondo, Sky).
what happens next
Electric Capital claims that five combined forces will attract new asset types on-chain. Growth of the stablecoin base through diversification of yield preferences, competition between protocols for differentiated products, vault infrastructure to absorb duration risk, tranching layers to expand the buyer base, and leveraging loops to increase demand for collateral-eligible assets.
The company also pointed to spending on AI infrastructure, which Goldman Sachs predicts will exceed $500 billion in 2026, as a catalyst, and noted that GPU leasing, data center construction, and energy contracts are natural candidates for on-chain financing.
This article was written with the help of AI Workflow. All of our stories are hand-picked, edited and fact-checked by humans.
