Funds lead year-to-date growth in tokenized market cap by $7B

Three tokenized funds from the biggest names in traditional finance have collectively added roughly $7.1 billion in market cap since the start of the year, making the fund category the single largest driver of growth across the entire tokenized asset landscape. BlackRock’s BUIDL, Circle’s USYC, and Franklin Templeton’s iBENJI now sit at a combined active market cap of approximately $7.23 billion. That figure accounts for a staggering share of the total on-chain tokenized asset market, which currently ranges between $33.9 billion and $36.7 billion depending on the tracking platform. The big three, by the numbers Circle’s USYC leads the pack with an active market cap of around $3 billion. BlackRock’s BUIDL follows at roughly $2.7 billion. Franklin Templeton’s iBENJI rounds out the trio at approximately $1.5 billion. Each of these products is essentially a blockchain-native wrapper around traditional money-market or treasury instruments. Wall Street showed up, but DeFi didn’t get an invite Despite sitting on billions in tokenized assets, these funds have almost zero interaction with decentralized finance protocols. DeFi utilization for the three major funds hovers between 0% and 1.05%...