Treasuries, Gold and the S&P 500: The Assets Growing Fastest On-Chain Are the Most Traditional Ones

CoinShares PLC said the strongest growth on blockchain-based financial infrastructure is coming not from native crypto assets but from some of the most traditional exposures in global markets, including Treasuries, gold, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100, oil, precious metals, and technology and semiconductor stocks. The findings come from The Growth of Hybrid Finance, the company’s second research report produced with on-chain data provider Token Terminal. CoinShares published the report on August 06, 2026 01:00 ET. The study covers the period from the second quarter of 2025 to the second quarter of 2026, with longer time series where available. CoinShares PLC, listed on Nasdaq under the ticker CSHR, said the data supports an investment thesis it introduced earlier this year under the name Hybrid Finance. That thesis argues that finance is not being displaced by blockchain technology, but instead is being rewired by it through the meeting point of performant blockchains, decentralised lending and trading venues, and tokenised representations of traditional asset classes. According to the report, the clearest signal is visible in how investors are using on-chain markets. In lending venues, the tokenised assets being posted are led by Treasury and multi-strategy funds, followed by private credit and delta-neutral strategies. In spot trading, the largest share of tokenised asset volume is in gold. In perpetual futures, activity is centered on oil and precious metals, on equity indexes such as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100, and on technology and semiconductor stocks. CoinShares said none of those assets are crypto assets, which it sees as important evidence that investors are not abandoning traditional finance for a separate financial system. Instead, the company said investors are moving traditional assets onto infrastructure that settles in seconds and remains active overnight and on weekends. CoinShares added that this helps explain why the assets seeing the most on-chain derivatives activity are those with continuous global interest but discontinuous trading hours in conventional markets. The report identified the same trend across three separate market segments: collateral, spot trading and derivatives. Deposits of tokenised real-world assets into lending platforms and decentralised exchanges more than tripled during the year, increasing from $2.3 billion to $7.4 billion, while total deposits across decentralised finance declined by approximately 15%. In spot trading, aggregate volumes on decentralised exchanges fell by around 70%, while volumes in tokenised real-world assets rose by roughly 220%. In perpetual futures, CoinShares said both trading volumes and open interest in real-world assets kept rising despite a broader slowdown that began in October 2025. Jean-Marie Mognetti, Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of CoinShares, said the industry had spent years promoting blockchain finance as a replacement for the existing financial system, but that the current data points elsewhere. He said the assets now being used on-chain include Treasuries, gold, the S&P 500, and semiconductor stocks, and emphasized that not one of them is a crypto asset. In his view, that shows traditional assets are being transferred onto faster settlement infrastructure rather than being replaced, making the shift one of convergence rather than disruption, and one that is being driven from the traditional side. CoinShares said Hybrid Finance describes a single market where regulated traditional assets and blockchain settlement infrastructure function together instead of separately. The company said this is the area where it has positioned itself since 2013 and where it operates as a regulated asset manager on both sides. The report defines tokenised real-world assets as tokenised funds, stocks and commodities. It only includes distributed assets, meaning tokenised assets that can be moved to wallets outside the issuing platform. CoinShares noted that networks hosting assets that are not broadly transferable across the venues examined are outside the scope of the analysis. All data in the report was provided by Token Terminal. CoinShares described Token Terminal as a full-stack onchain data platform that sources raw data directly from blockchain networks, transforms it in-house, and maintains standardized financial and alternative metrics for widely used blockchains, apps, and tokenized assets. It said Token Terminal’s data is used by leading institutional investors globally. CoinShares said it is headquartered in Jersey and has offices in France, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US. The firm said it is regulated in Jersey by the Jersey Financial Services Commission, in France by the Autorité des marchés financiers, and in the US by the Securities and Exchange Commission, National Futures Association and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.