CoinShares PLC (Nasdaq: CSHR) ("CoinShares" or the "Company"), a leading global asset manager specialising in digital assets, today published The Growth of Hybrid Finance, its second research report produced with on-chain data provider Token Terminal.
Earlier this year CoinShares set out Hybrid Finance as its investment thesis: the argument that finance is not being disrupted by blockchain technology but rewired by it, at the intersection of performant blockchains, decentralised lending and trading venues, and tokenised representations of traditional asset classes. The industry spent a decade arguing that one system would replace the other. This report, covering the period from the second quarter of 2025 to the second quarter of 2026, sets out the evidence that neither happened. The two are merging, and the movement is coming from the traditional side.
What is actually being used on-chain is not crypto
The clearest evidence is the composition of demand. The tokenised assets being deposited into on-chain lending venues are Treasury and multi-strategy funds first, followed by private credit and delta-neutral strategies. The largest share of spot trading volume in tokenised assets is in gold. On perpetual futures venues, activity is concentrated in oil and precious metals, in equity indexes including the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100, and in technology and semiconductor stocks.
None of these are crypto assets. They are the most conventional exposures in global markets, and they are the ones growing fastest on-chain. Investors are not leaving traditional finance for a parallel system. They are taking traditional assets onto infrastructure that settles in seconds and does not close overnight or at weekends, which is why the assets attracting the most on-chain derivatives activity are those with continuous global interest and discontinuous trading hours.
The same pattern in three separate markets
Across collateral, spot trading and derivatives, tokenised real-world assets grew while the market hosting them contracted.
Deposits of tokenised real-world assets into lending platforms and decentralised exchanges more than tripled over the year, rising from $2.3 billion to $7.4 billion, while total deposits across decentralised finance fell by approximately 15%. In spot trading, aggregate volumes on decentralised exchanges declined by around 70%, while volumes in tokenised real-world assets rose by roughly 220%. In perpetual futures, both trading volumes and open interest in real-world assets continued to climb against a broader slowdown that began in October 2025.
Jean-Marie Mognetti, Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of CoinShares, said:
“For a decade the industry told itself it was building a replacement for the financial system. We took a different view. The data has now caught up with it. Look at what is actually being used on-chain: Treasuries, gold, the S&P 500, semiconductor stocks. Not one of them is a crypto asset. Investors are not leaving traditional finance behind. They are moving traditional assets onto infrastructure that settles in seconds and does not close at night. That is convergence, not disruption, and it is arriving from the traditional side. This is the second report to show that it is measurable.”
Hybrid Finance
Hybrid Finance describes a single market in which regulated traditional assets and blockchain settlement infrastructure operate together rather than in parallel. It is where CoinShares has positioned itself since 2013, and where it operates as a regulated asset manager on both sides.
About the report
The Growth of Hybrid Finance covers the second quarter of 2025 to the second quarter of 2026, with longer time series where available. All data is provided by Token Terminal. Tokenised real-world assets here means tokenised funds, stocks and commodities.
The analysis covers distributed assets only, meaning tokenised assets that can be moved to wallets outside the issuing platform. Networks hosting assets that are not broadly transferable across the venues examined fall outside its scope.
Visit the Hybrid Finance report page: https://coinshares.com/insights/research-data/token-terminal-hybrid-finance-q2-report
About Token Terminal
Token Terminal is 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 the most widely used blockchains, apps, and tokenized assets. Token Terminal’s data is leveraged by the leading institutional investors globally.
