Who will value tokenized assets as DeFi goes institutional?

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation is running a tokenization trial with roughly 40 firms, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Vanguard and the New York Stock Exchange to represent shares and U.S. Treasuries on-chain. Market participants say those tokens can be used in lending only if reliable price feeds and clear failure rules exist.

On-chain real-world assets exceed $51 billion, while about $3.8 billion of those assets are actively used in decentralized finance lending and composability, a utilization rate near 7.7%. The difference reflects limited movement of tokenized assets from issuance and custody into active DeFi markets.

Lenders, curators and oracle providers define how tokenized assets are priced in lending markets. A functioning lending market needs a price feed, a defined set of venues that feed that price, and rules for what happens when those venues stop reporting. Oracle configuration typically starts with the venues included at launch and must be updated as liquidity shifts.

Matthew Fisher, chief executive of Katana Network, said oracle feeds often lag the concentration of liquidity for newly listed tokens. He described institutional counterparties delegating vetting to professional curators and vault operators who evaluate collateral, approve markets and set exposure limits. Operators named by market participants include Steakhouse, Gauntlet, Aave and Morpho.

A December 2025 study of decentralized credit found a small number of curators managing ERC-4626 vaults now intermediate a disproportionate share of value locked. Market participants caution that a single oracle manipulation inside a market trusted by a curator can damage that curator’s reputation and influence institutional acceptance.

Financial responsibility for price-feed failures varies. Depositors in many pools absorb first-dollar losses when a feed breaks, while the underlying lending protocol may face limited direct liability. In April, an exploit tied to an rsETH position outside a protocol’s core code led governance to estimate about $230 million in bad debt, with a protection module absorbing roughly $50 million as an initial backstop.

Tokenized equities, bonds and commodities follow the trading calendars of their reference markets, creating gaps on weekends and after-hours. Crypto-native tokens trade continuously across global venues, so their oracles focus on aggregation and manipulation resistance. Some platforms compute moving averages from market-maker quotes after primary markets close. Katana Network routes prices for gold, silver and oil through Chainlink and closes new positions when the underlying exchange stops trading, permitting only position reductions and isolating losses within margin.

Exchange hours are changing: the London Stock Exchange plans a night session for 2027, Nasdaq is moving toward longer weekday trading, and the operator Cboe has proposed extended U.S. equity hours. Weekend coverage and asset-specific halts remain outside current plans, leaving gaps for some tokenized markets.

Industry forecasts for tokenization vary. One projection from Citi estimates tokenized assets could reach $8.2 trillion by 2030; if DeFi utilization rises to 12%–18% in that scenario, active DeFi total value locked tied to real-world assets could reach roughly $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. In a lower scenario, tokenized assets could total $2.7 trillion by 2030 and, at 2%–4% utilization, generate $54 billion to $108 billion in active DeFi TVL.

Market participants are testing governance and accountability measures for price feeds. Proposed measures include curator disclosures, first-loss capital, mandatory insurance, fee clawbacks and auditable exposure reporting. Until governance arrangements and liability rules are settled, many tokenized assets are likely to remain on balance sheets rather than widely used as DeFi collateral.