The DTCC is running a tokenization trial with about 40 firms, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Vanguard and the NYSE. They want to represent shares and Treasuries on-chain. But these tokens only become usable collateral if a lending market can answer who prices them and what happens when the venues behind that price go quiet.
DefiLlama puts the on-chain RWA market cap above $51 billion. Yet those same assets generate only around $3.8 billion in DeFi active TVL. That is a utilization rate near 7.7%. It shows that most tokenized assets sit idle, not yet plugged into lending protocols.
Pricing becomes the gatekeeper
A lending market needs a price feed. It also needs a set of venues that the feed draws from, and rules for what happens when those venues go quiet. This challenge applies to tokenized stocks, bonds and gold. Someone must choose the oracle, test its independence, cap exposure, and decide when liquidations trigger.
Matthew Fisher, CEO of Katana Network, explained that an oracle’s configuration starts with the venues it pulls price data from at launch. Teams upgrade it as liquidity moves toward newer or deeper venues. For newly listed tokens, that upgrade lags because liquidity hasn’t concentrated in any single trusted venue yet.
Fisher said institutions delegate this vetting to professional curators. These are vault operators like Steakhouse and Gauntlet, who evaluate collateral, approve markets and set exposure limits on Morpho. Or they go to protocols like Aave that build their own oracle relationships directly. He noted that “the institutions appreciate that there is a professional kind of in the room.”
A December 2025 study on decentralized credit found that a small number of curators managing ERC-4626 vaults now intermediate a disproportionate share of total value locked. That concentrates underwriting decisions in that layer of the stack. Fisher’s account lines up with the data. He added that a single oracle manipulation inside one market a curator trusted can taint the curator’s entire track record. A curator with a damaged record faces what Fisher called “a hard no” from an investment committee.
Who pays when it fails
Fisher described the curator as the party that owns the risk decision. They absorb the reputational and commercial fallout when a market breaks. But the depositor typically absorbs the financial loss directly. Pool-based models like Aave or isolated markets on Morpho often leave the underlying protocol with no direct liability at all.
April’s KelpDAO exploit put that mismatch on display. Aave governance estimated $230 million in bad debt from the related rsETH position, which originated outside Aave’s own codebase. Its Umbrella module absorbed about $50 million as a first line of defense. That accountability gap raises concerns about institutions trusting curators whose primary penalty for a bad call is reputational, while the depositor eats the first dollar of loss.
First-loss capital, mandatory insurance, fee clawbacks and auditable exposure disclosures are the kinds of demands that could close that gap.
Bitcoin trades continuously across deep global venues, so its oracle design centers on aggregation and manipulation resistance. Tokenized equities, bonds and commodities inherit a market calendar their reference asset still observes. Fisher said there is “not an objective right approach” to pricing those assets once the primary market closes.
Some platforms compute a moving average from market-maker quotes once trading halts. Binance historically leaned on funding rates to influence weekend pricing before announcing new plans this year. Katana routes gold, silver and oil through Chainlink and closes those markets to new positions once the underlying exchange closes. Traders can still reduce existing positions, and isolated margin contains any losses that follow.
The London Stock Exchange plans a night-time session, LSE 24, for 2027. Nasdaq is moving toward 23-hour weekday trading. Cboe proposed 23×5 US equity trading. But weekends, trading halts and asset-specific gaps sit outside all three plans.
The adoption test
In the bull case, platforms standardize off-hours pricing, circuit breakers, first-loss capital and curator disclosures over the next several years. Citi projects tokenized assets reaching $8.2 trillion by 2030 under its bull scenario. If DeFi utilization climbs toward 12% to 18% in that world, RWA-linked DeFi active TVL could land near $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. That would turn tokenized Treasurys, equities and commodities into genuine collateral primitives.
In the bear case, tokenization keeps expanding in issuance terms without solving its governance layer. Citi’s bear scenario puts tokenized assets at $2.7 trillion by 2030. If DeFi utilization stays in the 2% to 4% range that today’s data implies, RWA-linked DeFi active TVL lands closer to $54 billion to $108 billion. Tokenized assets pile up on balance sheets, and DeFi lending and composability barely touch them.
Fisher noted that institutional oracle sensitivity for tokenized equities, bonds, or commodities whose underlying markets close on weekends is higher than for crypto-native assets. Institutions need a governance stack around their price feeds durable enough to survive an investment committee. They also need a settled answer for who absorbs the loss the day a feed gets it wrong.
