TechFlow News, March 21: According to The Defiant, Electric Capital released a research report on Monday analyzing 501 real-world yield assets and cross-referencing them with tokenized assets currently exhibiting significant on-chain activity. The report finds that only 34 yield-generating assets have on-chain market capitalizations exceeding $50 million—concentrated primarily in U.S. Treasuries, private credit, corporate bonds, and non-U.S. sovereign bonds. The remaining 93% of yield sources remain blocked by seven categories of barriers, including legal structures, challenges related to asset-backed securities (ABS), and practical integration hurdles involving commodities and computational infrastructure.
The report identifies distribution channels as the primary bottleneck: among 35 non-stablecoin on-chain yield-bearing RWAs, only two have more than 2,000 holders. Part of this stems from design constraints—for instance, BlackRock’s BUIDL requires a minimum investment of $5 million. Yet data shows most tokenized assets still rely heavily on a small number of large deployers and treasury managers. BUIDL’s top ten holders control 98% of its supply, with major holders including protocols such as Ethena, Ondo, and Sky.
Electric Capital identifies five key factors expected to drive broader asset tokenization: growth in stablecoin scale and diversification of yield preferences; product differentiation and competition among protocols; treasury infrastructure capable of absorbing duration risk; tiered mechanisms expanding the buyer base; and leveraged cycles amplifying demand for collateralized assets. The report also notes Goldman Sachs’ projection that AI infrastructure spending will exceed $500 billion by 2026, with GPU leasing, data center construction, and energy contracts emerging as promising new on-chain financing use cases.
