DTCC is conducting a tokenization trial with approximately 40 companies, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Vanguard and the NYSE. They want to represent stocks and treasuries on-chain. But these tokens only become usable collateral if a lending market can determine who values them and what happens when the places behind that price go silent.
DefiLlama puts the on-chain RWA market cap above $51 billion. Yet these same assets only generate around $3.8 billion in active DeFi TVL. That’s a utilization rate close to 7.7%. This shows that most tokenized assets remain inactive, not yet connected to lending protocols.
The price becomes the keeper
A credit market needs price feeding. It also needs a set of locations from which flow is drawn, and rules about what happens when those locations become quiet. This challenge applies to tokenized stocks, bonds and gold. Someone must choose the oracle, test its independence, limit its exposure, and decide when liquidations trigger.
Matthew Fisher, CEO of Katana Network, explained that setting up an oracle starts with the sites it pulls price data from at launch. Teams upgrade it as liquidity moves to newer or deeper locations. For newly listed tokens, this upgrade is lagging because liquidity has not yet concentrated in a single place of trust.
Fisher said institutions delegate this verification to professional curators. These are vault operators like Steakhouse and Gauntlet, which evaluate collateral, approve markets and set exposure limits on Morpho. Or they use protocols like Aave which directly build their own oracle relationships. He noted that “institutions appreciate the presence of a professional in the room.”
A December 2025 study on decentralized lending found that a small number of curators managing ERC-4626 vaults now hold a disproportionate share of the total value locked. This concentrates underwriting decisions in this layer of the stack. Fisher’s account fits the data. He added that a single oracle manipulation in a market that a conservative has trusted can taint his or her entire track record. A conservative with a damaged record faces what Fisher called “a resounding no” from an investment committee.
Who pays when it fails?
Fisher described the conservator as the party who makes the risk decision. They absorb the reputational and commercial consequences of market disruption. But the depositor generally absorbs the financial loss directly. Pool-based models like Aave or isolated markets on Morpho often leave the underlying protocol without any direct accountability.
April’s KelpDAO exploit highlighted this mismatch. Aave governance estimated $230 million in bad debt from the associated rsETH position, which originated outside of Aave’s own codebase. Its Umbrella module absorbed approximately $50 million as a first line of defense. This lack of accountability raises concerns about institutions trusting conservatives whose main penalty for a bad call is reputation, while the depositor takes the first dollar loss.
First loss capital, mandatory insurance, cost recovery and verifiable disclosure of exposures are the type of requirements that could close this gap.
Bitcoin continuously trades on deep global locations, so its oracle design focuses on resistance to aggregation and manipulation. Tokenized stocks, bonds and commodities inherit a market calendar that their reference asset always observes. Fisher said there was “no objective and correct approach” to valuing these assets once the primary market closed.
Some platforms calculate a moving average from market maker quotes once trading has stopped. Binance has historically relied on funding rates to influence weekend prices before announcing new plans this year. Katana routes gold, silver, and oil through Chainlink and closes these markets to new positions once the underlying exchange closes. Traders can always reduce existing positions and the isolated margin contains any resulting losses.
The London Stock Exchange is planning an evening session, LSE 24, for 2027. The Nasdaq is moving towards 11 p.m. trading on weekdays. Cboe offered 23×5 US stock trading. But weekends, trading halts and asset-specific gaps do not fall under the three plans.
The adoption test
In the bull case, platforms normalize out-of-hours prices, circuit breakers, first loss capital and conservative information over the next few years. Citi projects tokenized assets to reach $8.2 trillion by 2030 under its bullish scenario. If DeFi usage climbs to between 12% and 18% worldwide, the active DeFi TVL linked to RWA could reach between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. This would transform tokenized Treasuries, stocks and commodities into true collateral primitives.
In the bear case, tokenization continues to grow in terms of issuance without resolving its governance layer. Citi’s bearish scenario estimates tokenized assets at $2.7 trillion by 2030. If DeFi usage remains within the 2-4% range that current data implies, active DeFi TVL tied to RWA approaches $54-108 billion. Tokenized assets are piling up on balance sheets, and DeFi lending and composability are barely touching them.
Fisher noted that the sensitivity of institutional oracles for tokenized stocks, bonds or commodities whose underlying markets close on weekends is higher than for crypto-native assets. Institutions need governance around their price feeds that is durable enough to survive an investment committee. They also need a definitive answer as to who will absorb the loss the day a food goes wrong.
