RWA: The Next Breakthrough Point for Ethereum After DeFi

Recently, the passage of the "GENIUS Act" has reignited the market's interest in RWA. In addition to stablecoins and significant legislative progress, the RWA sector has quietly achieved several important milestones: a continuously strong growth trend and a series of eye-catching breakthroughs. At this unprecedented height of market attention and with the broader adoption of traditional finance just around the corner, it is crucial to closely examine the current RWA landscape. RWA based on Ethereum has shown astonishing month-over-month growth, often maintaining double-digit highs. Another key factor driving this momentum is the "Etherealization" ( as a catalyst for regulatory development, along with the Ethereum Foundation listing RWA as a strategic priority. At this critical juncture, this article will delve into the RWA development dynamics on Ethereum and its Layer-2 networks.

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Data Analysis: Ethereum RWA Growth Panorama

The data clearly indicates: the RWA value of Ethereum has entered a clear growth cycle. Looking at the total value trend of Ethereum's non-stablecoin RWA, its long-term trajectory is remarkable – maintaining a range of 1-2 billion USD for many years, until entering a rapid growth phase in April 2024. This growth momentum continues to accelerate in 2025. The core driving force comes from BlackRock's BUIDL fund, which currently has a scale of 2.7 billion USD. BUIDL has itself shown parabolic growth since March 2025, strongly driving the overall expansion of the Ethereum RWA ecosystem.

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By asset class, excluding stablecoins ), the real-world assets on Ethereum ( RWA ) are highly concentrated in two main categories: government bond projects ( 75.9% ) and commodities ( primarily in gold, 20.3% ), while other categories have a smaller proportion. In contrast, in the overall composition of RWA market capitalization in the crypto market, private credit has the highest share ( 57.4% ), followed by government bond projects ( 30.9% ).

Further focusing on the leading assets of Ethereum RWA, BUIDL's dominance is significant. A comparison with a year ago shows that at that time, the scale of BUIDL was comparable to products like PAXG and XAUT, but it has now significantly surpassed them. Although the composition of the top ten projects remains basically stable, the growth rate of government bond products is significantly ahead of gold-related products, and the market share continues to expand.

From the perspective of protocols, the current leaders are mainly stablecoin issuers—the top four protocols are Tether, Circle, MakerDAO( Dai stablecoin system), and Ethena. It is worth noting that the total value of the securitization protocol Securitize has significantly surpassed that of some stablecoin projects like FDUSD and USDC, rising to the forefront. Other securities protocols that made it into the top ten include Ondo and Superstate.

Focusing on the monthly data from early 2024 to the present, the growth wave began in April 2024, achieving an astonishing increase of 26.6% that month—contributing a quarter of the total increase in Ethereum RWA for the month. This momentum continued for the next three months, although it slightly slowed down during the period from August to December 2024, the network still maintained an incremental growth of about 20 million USD/month with a month-on-month growth rate of about 5%, annualized over 60%.

In January 2025, the growth rate exploded again, soaring 33.2% month-on-month. After a brief adjustment in February, Ethereum maintained double-digit growth for four consecutive months, with the month-on-month increases in April and May both exceeding 20%.

( BUIDL

With BUIDL rapidly rising to become the largest project by market capitalization in the Ethereum RWA ecosystem, a detailed analysis of its growth trajectory is crucial. The month-over-month growth rate chart reveals that as of March 2025, this indicator remains relatively stable, followed by an explosive leap in March 2025. However, the latest data from May shows that the ultra-fast growth trend has slightly slowed down, yet there is still an increase of $210 million, with a month-over-month growth rate of 8.38%. The development in the coming months is a key observation window—it's necessary to track whether its growth rate continues to slow down or continues to experience explosive growth.

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The explosive growth of BUIDL is driven by multiple factors. The growth mainly comes from institutional demand, and the competitiveness of products is the key driving force for success: including 24/7 operation, faster settlement speeds compared to traditional finance, and high returns within a compliant framework. It is worth noting that DeFi integration is achieving synergies and unlocking more utilities, such as Ethena Labs' USDtb product – which is 90% backed by BUIDL. Meanwhile, the recognition of BUIDL as quality collateral continues to rise, with Securitize's sBUIDL further unlocking DeFi integration scenarios.

The asset distribution of BUIDL is highly concentrated: about 93% is concentrated in the Ethereum mainnet, while the scale of other ecological chains is difficult to match. At the same time, with the continuous expansion of asset management scale, BUIDL's monthly dividends have been continuously setting new highs, reaching $4.17 million in March 2025, and soaring to $7.9 million by May.

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( stablecoin

In view of the structural impact that the "GENIUS Act" will have on the regulatory framework for stablecoins, it is of significant forward-looking importance to systematically examine the development trajectory of the Ethereum stablecoin market. Since 2024, the total market value of this sector has shown a steady upward trend. Although the growth rate appears slightly slower compared to other RWA sub-sectors, it still maintains a resilient monthly growth pace.

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Among small projects ) with a market cap of less than $500 million, most projects experienced ongoing contraction in early 2024. However, by the end of 2024, the market cap of most projects continued to rise, with GHO, M, and USDO showing sustained growth. At the same time, a number of new stablecoin projects emerged with a market cap exceeding $50 million, and the Ethereum stablecoin ecosystem became more diverse, leading to a continuous prosperity of small market cap projects starting from 2025.

Medium-sized projects ###5-50 million USD ( will only have FDUSD and FRAX in 2024; BUSD will drop sharply from 1 billion USD in January 2024 to less than 500 million USD by March due to the cessation of issuance. However, in 2025, both USD0 and PYUSD will break through the 500 million USD threshold, leading to a more diverse range of medium-sized stablecoins.

The leading stablecoins ) > 5 billion USD ( continue to be dominated by USDT and USDC: USDT maintained a market value of 40 billion USD for most of 2024, surged to 70 billion USD in early December, and then gradually stabilized until a recent decline in market value; USDC steadily grew from 22 billion USD in January 2024 to 38 billion USD in May 2025. At the beginning of 2025, both USDS and USDe broke through 5 billion USD, but USDT and USDC still lead in market share.

USDT and USDC dominate absolutely, directly affecting the entire stablecoin ecosystem.

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The growth in November 2024 is particularly noteworthy: USDT surged by 30.16% month-over-month, while USDC achieved a growth of 16.31%. Following this spike, there are several months of sustained growth, with USDC showing more robust growth in subsequent months, each month exceeding 5%. According to disclosures from the issuers: Tether attributes this to "the influx of collateral assets from exchanges and institutional trading desks in response to the expected surge in trading volume"; Circle emphasizes that "the circulation of USDC has increased by 78% year-on-year... besides user demand, it also stems from the market confidence restoration and the improvement of standard systems driven by emerging stablecoin regulatory rules."

However, the market momentum has clearly shifted recently - the on-chain USDT on Ethereum has stagnated in growth over the past four months, and for the first time in many months, USDC experienced a decline in May 2025 after sustained growth. This phenomenon may indicate that the market is transitioning to a new cycle phase.

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) L2 ecosystem

In the broader RWA ecosystem, Ethereum maintains an absolute dominant position with a market share of 59.23% ( excluding stablecoins ), but it still faces key challenges.

It is noteworthy that zkSync has jumped to second place thanks to the single drive of the Tradable project, while Stellar completely relies on the Franklin Templeton BENJI Fund ( with a scale of $455.9 million ), occupying third place. Although the on-chain data for both public chains' RWA is impressive, their structural flaws cannot be ignored: the lack of asset diversity and reliance on a single project.

Just as zkSync and Stellar showcase ecological characteristics, most L2 networks currently face the challenge of insufficient ecological diversity—its RWA market value heavily relies on 1-2 core projects for support. For example, in Arbitrum's total market value of $256 million, BENJI contributes $111.9 million, accounting for 43.7%, and Spiko occupies $93.5 million, accounting for 36.5%, with both monopolizing over 80% of the market value; Polygon also shows a similar distribution pattern, with core market value sources concentrated in the two major projects of Spiko and Mercado Bitcoin.

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Expanding the vision to the entire L2 ecosystem, the RWA value and market share of each network show significant differentiation. Apart from zkSync, only Polygon and Arbitrum have formed substantial scale effects, while the remaining L2s are still in the early stages of development. The success of Polygon and Arbitrum heavily relies on a single driving force, Spiko—this project contributes about one-third of the total RWA value across both networks.

Looking at the overall evolution of the RWA market cap in Layer-2 networks, its growth cycle does not completely synchronize with Layer-1: there was no synchronized growth starting in mid-2024. The integration of Tradable projects by zkSync brought about a market cap increase of around $2 billion. However, even excluding this impact, the growth trend of L2 has still been established—since September 2024, L2 networks have consistently maintained double-digit month-on-month growth. In contrast, in the previous phase, the expansion of RWA always exhibited sporadic and weak characteristics. In summary, the end of 2024 marks a turning point for the development of the L2 ecosystem's RWA: it has entered a strong growth cycle.

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Etherealize: Ethereum RWA New Engine

As a key driving force behind the adoption of Ethereum RWA, the birth of Etherealize stems from the industry's bottlenecks.