Tokenized real-world assets reached $34.5 billion by the end of August, according to a Dune report published Wednesday — but the composition of that market points to a striking imbalance between how value is stored on-chain and how it actually moves.

Tokenized Treasury funds account for roughly half of the total market, the report found. Yet in August, those funds turned over just 0.006% of supply. In practical terms, nearly all tokenized Treasury value sat static for the month, functioning as a yield-bearing store of value rather than a circulating instrument.

The contrast with tokenized equities is stark. Equity tokens represent only about 8% of the overall RWA market by capitalization, yet they generated 93% of spot trading volume over the same period, according to Dune's data.

Two Different Products Wearing the Same Label

The divergence reveals that "tokenized real-world assets" describes two structurally different businesses sharing one category. Tokenized Treasuries — money market funds issued on-chain by the likes of asset managers and fintech platforms — behave like a savings product. Holders park stablecoin or fiat-backed capital in them to capture Treasury yields, and the incentive structure rewards patience, not turnover. Low velocity is, in a sense, the design working as intended.

Tokenized equities invert that logic. Their holders and traders treat them as price-discovery instruments, and the 93% share of spot volume from just 8% of market capitalization indicates active secondary markets where participants trade on price movement rather than park capital for yield.

What the Numbers Mean for Market Structure

The 0.006% turnover figure carries operational implications for venues and issuers building around tokenized cash products. If the primary use case for tokenized Treasuries is yield accumulation with minimal secondary activity, then liquidity infrastructure — market makers, order books, automated market maker pools — matters far less for that segment than issuance, redemption rails and custody integration.

For protocols and platforms that have positioned themselves as trading venues for RWAs, the Dune data suggests the addressable trading volume currently concentrates almost entirely in equities. The $34.5 billion headline number, often cited as evidence of institutional adoption, therefore requires disaggregation: roughly $17 billion of it behaves like a deposit base, while the actively traded slice is materially smaller and skewed toward a single asset class.

The figure also frames a measurement question for the industry. Market-size reporting that aggregates capitalization without turnover can overstate the depth of on-chain RWA markets. A $34.5 billion market where the dominant segment trades at 0.006% monthly velocity is not comparable, in activity terms, to traditional markets of equivalent notional size.

The Road Ahead

Whether tokenized Treasury turnover rises from these levels depends largely on whether the instruments evolve from passive yield vehicles into collateral and settlement assets — uses that would require movement between accounts, protocols and venues. Until then, the gap between where the capital sits and where the trading happens — Treasuries in size, equities in velocity — is likely to remain the defining structural feature of the on-chain RWA market, and one that any assessment of the sector's $34.5 billion scale should account for.