Author | Sam @IOSG
TL;DR:
- Using the stablecoin bill as an introduction, highlighting recent public attention and discussion on RWA, then discussing RWA on Ethereum
- Data analysis (zksync can be a highlight)
- The impact of Etherealize on Ethereum
- Ethereum's stablecoin issuance and DeFi have always had a strong moat. Combining the new US policies, can RWA organically connect traditional finance and DeFi? As the most trusted and decentralized blockchain, where do we continue to be optimistic about Ethereum
Bill Catalysis and Market Attention
Against the backdrop of rapid evolution in traditional finance and regulatory environment, the recent passage of the GENIUS Bill has reignited market interest in RWA. Beyond stablecoins and major legislative progress, the RWA field has quietly achieved multiple important milestones: sustained strong growth and a series of eye-catching breakthroughs—such as Kraken launching tokenized stocks and ETFs, Robinhood proposing to the SEC to grant token assets equal status with traditional assets, and Centrifuge issuing a $400 million decentralized JTRSY fund on Solana.
At a time of unprecedented market attention and imminent broader adoption of traditional finance, it is crucial to closely examine the current RWA landscape—especially the position of leading platforms like Ethereum. RWA based on Ethereum has shown astonishing month-on-month growth, consistently maintaining double-digit highs; the growth rate in 2025 is even more accelerated compared to single-digit months in 2024. Another key factor driving this momentum is "Etherealize" as a catalyst for regulatory development, and the Ethereum Foundation listing RWA as a strategic priority. At this critical juncture, this article will delve into the development dynamics of RWA on Ethereum and its Layer-2 networks.
RWA Ecosystem Map, IOSG
Data Analysis: Comprehensive Growth of Ethereum RWA
[The rest of the translation follows the same approach, maintaining the specific terminology and preserving the structure of the original text.]
BUIDL Distribution, screenshot from RWA.xyz
Stablecoins
Given that the GENIUS Act will have a structural impact on the stablecoin regulatory framework, systematically examining the development trajectory of the Ethereum stablecoin market is of significant forward-looking importance. Since 2024, the total market value of this sector has continued to show a steady upward trend, although the growth rate is slightly slower compared to other RWA sub-sectors, it still maintains a resilient monthly growth rhythm.
RWA.xyz, IOSG
In small projects (＜$500 million), most projects experienced continuous contraction in early 2024. However, towards the end of 2024, most projects' market values continued to rise, with GHO, M, and USDO showing continuous growth. At the same time, a batch of new stablecoin projects crossed the $50M market value, and the Ethereum stablecoin ecosystem became more diverse, with small market cap projects continuing to flourish from 2025.
In medium-sized projects (5-50 billion dollars), only FDUSD and FRAX existed in 2024; BUSD, due to termination of issuance, plummeted from $1 billion in January 2024 to less than $500 million in March. However, in 2025, USD0 and PYUSD both broke through the $500 million threshold, making medium-sized stablecoins more diverse.
Top stablecoins (＞$50 billion) continue to be dominated by USDT and USDC: USDT remained stable at a $40 billion market value for most of 2024, jumped to $70 billion in early December, then gradually stabilized, until recently experiencing a market value decline; USDC steadily grew from $22 billion in January 2024 to $38 billion in May 2025. In early 2025, USDS and USDe both broke through $5 billion, but USDT and USDC still lead by a wide margin in market share.
RWA.xyz, IOSG
USDT and USDC occupy an absolutely dominant position, directly influencing the entire stablecoin ecosystem.
The growth in November 2024 was particularly noteworthy: USDT surged 30.16% month-on-month that month, while USDC achieved 16.31% growth. After this surge, growth continued for several months, with USDC showing more stable growth in subsequent months, all above 5%. According to issuer disclosures: Tether attributed this to "exchanges and institutional trading desks flooding with collateral assets in anticipation of increased trading volume"; Circle emphasized "USDC circulation year-on-year growth of 78%... besides user demand, it also stems from market confidence rebuilding and standard system improvement brought by emerging stablecoin regulatory rules".
However, market momentum has recently changed significantly - in the past four months, USDT on the Ethereum chain has been stagnant in growth, and in May 2025, USDC experienced its first decline after months of growth. This phenomenon may signal that the market is transitioning to a new cycle stage.
RWA.xyz, IOSG
L2 Ecosystem
In the broader RWA ecosystem landscape, Ethereum maintains absolute dominance with a 59.23% market share (excluding stablecoins), but still faces key challenges.
Screenshot from RWA.xyz
Notably, zkSync leaped to second place driven by a single Tradable project, while Stellar entirely relies on the Franklin Templeton BENJI Fund (with a scale of $455.9 million) to occupy the third place. Although the on-paper RWA data of these two public chains is impressive, their structural deficiencies cannot be ignored: lack of asset diversity and dependence on single projects.
[The translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text.]Recently, Etherealize founder Vivek Raman was invited to attend a congressional hearing of the House Financial Services Committee on "U.S. Innovation and the Future of Digital Assets", continuing to expand Ethrealize's important role in regulatory communication.
Currently, Etherealize has only launched a data dashboard on the product side, used for market education and promotion, but the team explains in their roadmap that they will develop an SDK for institutions and are recruiting founding engineers, making it worth continuing to follow Etherealize's progress in promoting RWA products.
In the upcoming roadmap, the focus of the second quarter of 2025 is to release an SDK for institutional-level use. This toolkit will integrate hosting interfaces, compliance processes, and gas optimization modules, helping banks and asset management institutions build a secure and auditable issuance process, significantly lowering the threshold for traditional financial institutions to participate in Ethereum RWA.
On this basis, in the third quarter, a pilot project for an enterprise-level wallet based on Noir will be launched, ensuring privacy protection reaches an enterprise-level standard, and meeting the confidentiality requirements of RWA transactions through a "default privacy" mechanism.
In the fourth quarter, the team will focus on the international market: they plan to establish cooperation with Singapore's Digital Port and the Swiss Crypto Valley Association, targeting localized product functions and compliance interfaces for regulatory environments and market needs in the Asia-Pacific and European regions.
Meanwhile, to reduce friction between different Layer-2 networks, the team will lead efforts to promote Rollup standardization and build a unified cross-chain interface to enable asset free flow, thereby integrating RWAs in the Ethereum ecosystem and enhancing interoperability.
Finally, to bridge the gap between traditional financial institutions and blockchain technology, the team will continue to adhere to a 24×7 support model, providing end-to-end professional services from legal document preparation to smart contract deployment.
Ethereum RWA Strategic Moat
First-Mover Advantage
Traditional financial institutions' decision-making processes differ from DeFi: regulatory review, pilot validation, and Proof of Concept (PoC) significantly extend deployment cycles. In the early stages, institutions often adopt a cautious strategy, only initiating expansion after pilot results are verified. Although top Ethereum projects like BUIDL dominate, they still experienced nearly a year of accumulation before achieving explosive growth. Ethereum's core advantage lies in its ecosystem's first-mover position - having completed experimental collaborations with multiple top financial institutions even before the RWA wave emerged.
(The translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text, maintaining the specified translations for specific terms and preserving the structure of the original text.)Ethereum still holds a significant advantage in the RWA field. Whether it's the first-mover advantage, security, deep ecosystem accumulation, grand technological roadmap updates, strong BUIDL leadership, Layer2 diversity, or Etherealize's deep empowerment, these factors collectively construct Ethereum's core barriers in the wave of traditional finance on-chain.
With the promotion of the 'Genius Act', US dollar credit is accelerating its integration into the on-chain world. This not only brings larger capital inflows and creates more profit and growth opportunities, but also poses a challenge: it makes the underlying support of Ethereum's financial system more inclined towards fiat currency (US dollar), thereby introducing fiat currency credit risk and potentially making the on-chain settlement system an extension of US dollar hegemony; the on-chain world is no longer an independent parallel financial system. In this context of explosive growth, there are also underlying concerns, primarily about Ethereum's exploration of its own positioning - whether to support deep binding with the US dollar system.
Appendix
[1]https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Asset_Tokenization_in_Financial_Markets_2025.pdf
Opportunities
Classified by asset type, Ethereum; overall; other chains (if volume is large enough)
