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While most of DeFi spent the past three years nursing its wounds from a brutal TVL drawdown, one corner of the market was doing something unusual: growing. Centrifuge, the platform that helps bring real-world assets onto the blockchain, has seen tokenized assets on its infrastructure balloon from $12 million to nearly $4 billion, a roughly 300% growth trajectory that stands in sharp contrast to the broader decentralized finance landscape.
The platform’s own Total Value Locked now exceeds $1.8 billion, with 1,768 assets tokenized across its ecosystem. That makes Centrifuge one of the largest venues for real-world asset tokenization in crypto, a category that has quietly become the sector’s most credible bridge to traditional finance.
From niche experiment to institutional magnet
Centrifuge crossed the $1 billion TVL mark in August 2025, a milestone fueled in large part by institutional products like Janus Henderson’s tokenized offerings. Janus Henderson alone accounted for roughly $1.3 billion in tokenized assets on the platform during 2025, with its JAAA fund serving as a key driver of inflows.
On June 30, 2026, New York Life Investment Management, one of the largest asset managers in the US, partnered with Centrifuge to launch a tokenized high-yield corporate bond fund.
It’s worth parsing the numbers carefully, though. The $4 billion figure and the 300% growth metric appear to reflect sector-wide trends in tokenized assets on Ethereum rather than Centrifuge’s own balance sheet in isolation. Centrifuge’s explicitly reported TVL sits in the $1.3 billion to $1.8 billion range. The broader figure captures the ecosystem that Centrifuge has helped build and infrastructure it supports, which is a meaningful distinction for anyone trying to value the platform precisely.
Why tokenization thrived while DeFi struggled
The divergence between tokenized RWAs and the rest of DeFi tells a story about what actually generates durable value in crypto. Much of DeFi’s TVL during the 2021-2022 era was circular: tokens deposited to earn more tokens, which were deposited to earn even more tokens. When token prices fell, the whole stack collapsed.
Tokenized real-world assets work differently. A tokenized bond fund derives its value from the underlying bonds, not from speculative token incentives. The yield comes from corporate borrowers making interest payments, not from a governance token that someone hopes will go up. That’s why the category kept growing even as DeFi TVL contracted: the value proposition was anchored in something external to crypto’s own reflexive loops.
Centrifuge positioned itself early in this shift, building the infrastructure that institutions needed to bring traditional assets on-chain. That meant solving decidedly unglamorous problems: legal structures for tokenized securities, compliance frameworks, integration with existing custody solutions.
What institutional adoption actually looks like
The New York Life partnership is instructive for understanding where this market is headed. High-yield corporate bonds are a massive asset class in traditional finance, typically accessible only through conventional brokerage accounts and institutional channels. Putting them on-chain doesn’t just create a new distribution channel. It potentially opens up 24/7 trading, fractional ownership, and composability with other DeFi protocols.
Janus Henderson’s early success on Centrifuge demonstrated that institutional-grade asset managers could operate in this environment. New York Life’s entry suggests that the playbook is now being copied by some of the largest names in asset management.
The risk, of course, is that the regulatory environment shifts in unfavorable ways. Tokenized securities sit at the intersection of crypto regulation and traditional securities law, a jurisdictional overlap that remains unresolved in most markets.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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