New CoinShares and Token Terminal research finds deposits of tokenised real-world assets more than tripled to $7.4 billion over the past year, while total deposits across decentralised finance fell by around 15%, evidence, CoinShares says, that finance is converging with blockchain infrastructure rather than being displaced by it.

CoinShares, a leading global asset manager specialising in digital assets, published The Growth of Hybrid Finance, its second research report produced with on-chain data provider Token Terminal.

Earlier this year CoinShares set out Hybrid Finance as its investment thesis: the argument that finance is not being disrupted by blockchain technology but rewired by it, at the intersection of performant blockchains, decentralised lending and trading venues, and tokenised representations of traditional asset classes. The industry spent a decade arguing that one system would replace the other. This report, covering the period from the second quarter of 2025 to the second quarter of 2026, sets out the evidence that neither happened. The two are merging, and the movement is coming from the traditional side.

What is actually being used on-chain is not crypto

The clearest evidence is the composition of demand. The tokenised assets being deposited into on-chain lending venues are Treasury and multi-strategy funds first, followed by private credit and delta-neutral strategies. The largest share of spot trading volume in tokenised assets is in gold. On perpetual futures venues, activity is concentrated in oil and precious metals, in equity indexes including the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100, and in technology and semiconductor stocks.

None of these are crypto assets. They are the most conventional exposures in global markets, and they are the ones growing fastest on-chain. Investors are not leaving traditional finance for a parallel system. They are taking traditional assets onto infrastructure that settles in seconds and does not close overnight or at weekends, which is why the assets attracting the most on-chain derivatives activity are those with continuous global interest and discontinuous trading hours.

The same pattern in three separate markets

Across collateral, spot trading and derivatives, tokenised real-world assets grew while the market hosting them contracted.

Deposits of tokenised real-world assets into lending platforms and decentralised exchanges more than tripled over the year, rising from $2.3 billion to $7.4 billion, while total deposits across decentralised finance fell by approximately 15%. In spot trading, aggregate volumes on decentralised exchanges declined by around 70%, while volumes in tokenised real-world assets rose by roughly 220%. In perpetual futures, both trading volumes and open interest in real-world assets continued to climb against a broader slowdown that began in October 2025.

Jean-Marie Mognetti, Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of CoinShares, said:

“For a decade the industry told itself it was building a replacement for the financial system. We took a different view. The data has now caught up with it. Look at what is actually being used on-chain: Treasuries, gold, the S&P 500, semiconductor stocks. Not one of them is a crypto asset. Investors are not leaving traditional finance behind. They are moving traditional assets onto infrastructure that settles in seconds and does not close at night. That is convergence, not disruption, and it is arriving from the traditional side. This is the second report to show that it is measurable.”

Hybrid Finance

Hybrid Finance describes a single market in which regulated traditional assets and blockchain settlement infrastructure operate together rather than in parallel. It is where CoinShares has positioned itself since 2013, and where it operates as a regulated asset

Source: Coinshares