Tokenised cash barely trades, Dune finds
Dune's latest report finds tokenised real-world assets have hit .5bn, but tokenised cash barely trades while stocks drive 93% of on-chain activity.
Tokenised cash is the largest asset class on-chain but barely trades, according to a new report from Dune.
The report finds tokenised real-world assets have reached .5bn, up 141% in the year to August. However, most of that value is sitting still. Tokenised stocks make up just 8% of the market but account for 93% of on-chain trading.
Rather than focusing on issuance, the report looks at what happens afterwards: how much of the supply is actually used, and whether on-chain markets behave like the traditional markets they track.
In equities, on-chain investors are favouring single names over funds, in contrast to traditional markets where ETFs dominate.
Single-stock trading reached .6bn in spot volume and .4bn in perpetuals volume in August. Asian stocks make up 24% of equity open interest in perpetuals.
Tokenised commodities reached .5bn, almost entirely gold. Exposure to oil is mainly synthetic, through perpetuals.
The report also finds that around a fifth of on-chain credit is posted as collateral on decentralised lending protocols. Traditional collateral markets, by comparison, rely mostly on Treasury bills.
Speaking to Fortune, Dune CEO Fredrik Haga said: "The way the market is wired is completely different."
The report, After Issuance: Reading the Onchain RWA Market, covers the period to 31 August 2026 and uses Dune's new RWA dataset, which tracks real-world assets in both tokenised and synthetic forms.