Standard Chartered’s $2.7 trillion DeFi forecast depends on tokenized asset distribution, not just issuance

Standard Chartered’s latest DeFi forecast is notable less for the headline number than for what it says about where tokenized markets may be heading next. In a research note summarized Monday, the bank said assets locked in decentralized finance could expand 37-fold to roughly $2.7 trillion by the end of 2030. The core argument is not simply that more securities, funds and cash-like products will be tokenized. It is that a much larger share of those assets will start circulating inside onchain protocols rather than sitting as isolated wrappers on public blockchains. For RWA markets, that distinction matters. Issuance alone creates digital packaging. Distribution into lending, trading and collateral markets is what starts to create financial infrastructure.

The note points to a wide gap between current issuance and current usage. Standard Chartered said only about 3% of stablecoins and 10% of tokenized real-world assets are used in DeFi today, and it expects the share of tokenized assets active in DeFi to rise to around 30% by 2030 from roughly 3.5% now. That is an aggressive call, but it lines up with a pattern the market has already started to show: institutions are no longer treating tokenization as a back-office experiment alone. They are increasingly testing whether onchain assets can become usable building blocks for liquidity management, trading access and collateral workflows. In that sense, the bullish case is really a bet on financial distribution, not just digital issuance.

Current market structure helps explain why that thesis is getting more attention. RWA.xyz’s live dashboard now shows about $31.8 billion in distributed asset value and another $342.2 billion in represented asset value across tokenized real-world assets, alongside roughly $297.0 billion in stablecoin value. Within government securities, the largest onchain products are already measured in the billions rather than the millions. Circle’s USYC is near $3.01 billion, BlackRock’s BUIDL is around $2.37 billion, and Ondo’s USDY is about $2.15 billion, with Ondo’s OUSG still above $550 million. Those figures do not prove the bank’s 2030 target. But they do show that tokenized cash and Treasury exposure has become large enough to matter as a source of balance-sheet liquidity for the next layer of onchain finance.

That base is important because the first wave of tokenized RWAs has been dominated by products that look more like institutional cash management tools than like free-floating internet securities. BlackRock’s BUIDL is structured as a tokenized liquidity fund, while Ondo’s product lineup splits between OUSG, a short-term U.S. Treasuries fund, and USDY, a yield-bearing dollar token. These products are useful precisely because they can give institutions a familiar asset profile while moving settlement, transfer and collateral logic onto blockchain rails. If that model keeps expanding, DeFi’s next growth phase may come less from speculative leverage and more from regulated cash equivalents and Treasury-backed instruments becoming routine components of onchain portfolios.

Still, the forecast should not be read as a straight-line projection. Getting from today’s low single-digit onchain usage rates to a world where nearly a third of tokenized assets are active in DeFi requires multiple problems to be solved at once. Permissioning has to become easier for institutions without breaking compliance boundaries. Liquidity has to deepen across venues so tokenized assets are not trapped in single-issuer silos. Risk systems need to mature around valuation, collateral haircuts, redemption timing and smart-contract controls. And the market still has to prove that investors actually want to use tokenized Treasuries, money-market funds and yield-bearing dollar products inside protocols rather than only holding them as static wrappers.

That is why this forecast is better understood as a directional signal than as a near-term market call. Standard Chartered is effectively arguing that the biggest upside in digital assets may come from the connection between regulated balance-sheet products and open settlement rails. The bank has already outlined a separate view that non-stablecoin tokenized RWAs could become a multi-trillion-dollar market by 2028, with tokenized money-market funds and U.S. equities doing much of the heavy lifting. Monday’s DeFi forecast extends that logic one step further: once tokenized assets exist at scale, the next question is how much of that value can actually circulate through onchain markets.

For RWA builders, that makes the next battleground clear. The prize is not just launching another tokenized fund or wrapping another familiar financial product. It is making those assets usable across lending pools, collateral engines, treasury operations and secondary trading venues in a way institutions can trust. If that happens, DeFi will start to look less like a separate crypto vertical and more like an operating layer for tokenized finance. If it does not, the market may still grow, but it will look far more like a collection of isolated issuer channels than the integrated capital network the strongest tokenization bulls are projecting.