> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.onspatial.org/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.onspatial.org/start-here/the-moment.md). # Why now is the right time Why 2026 is the year a syndicated credit market for tokenized real-world assets became possible, told through the three conditions it depended on. A market like Spatial needed three conditions together. Tokenized stocks had to become a normal on-chain asset carrying a price contracts could rely on. There had to be genuine borrowing demand against RWAs, at meaningful size. And existing lending designs had to leave room that a different design could occupy. In 2024 not one of these held. Today every one of them does. ## What pooled lending cannot do Almost all on-chain lending against RWAs runs through pools, such as Aave Horizon, Morpho vaults and Kamino. Pools carry three structural limits that parameter tuning will never fix: * Every borrower is priced off one utilisation curve, regardless of the collateral posted. * A bad loan is paid for by all the pool's suppliers together. * Assets lacking deep liquidity have to be tightly capped or excluded. None of that bothers treasuries or index ETFs. It all bothers a holder of one mid-cap stock token who wants credit for 30 days at a rate a particular lender would accept. What that holder needs is pricing per loan, a term that ends, and risk that remains with the party who chose it. Spatial is built to be exactly that, as the page on [the eight design rules](/start-here/eight-rules.md) explains one rule at a time. ## July 2026: the obstacle removed Robinhood Chain launched its mainnet on 1 July 2026. It is the only place where a regulated broker issues tokenized stocks as ordinary ERC-20s on an L2, backed one to one, with Chainlink feeds pricing them 24/5, plus account abstraction under ERC-4337 and contract deployment open to anyone. Robinhood describes these tokens as suitable for "lending pools and trading collateral". The longer argument lives in [why Robinhood Chain](/the-network/the-case-for-robinhood-chain.md). ## How big tokenized stocks have become Excluding stablecoins, transferable RWAs on public chains stood near $7.9B at the end of 2024, near $21B at the start of 2026, and near $38.7B now. Tokenized stocks are the fastest growing category in that figure, going from around $424M in mid-2025 to around $2.59B in August 2026. Sources vary by roughly 20 percent, largely because they disagree on counting assets that cannot be transferred. | Category | Transferable value on-chain | Behind the figure | | ----------------------- | --------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Tokenized stocks** | **\~$2.6B** | Ondo Stocks over $1B TVL; xStocks over $25B of cumulative volume; issued by Robinhood, Coinbase and Binance | | Tokenized US Treasuries | \~$16.0B | USDY $2.2B, BUIDL $2.8B, BENJI \~$2.4B, USYC $2.9B | | Tokenized credit | \~$7.5B distributed | Roughly $35B once "represented" assets that cannot be transferred, Figure HELOCs for instance, are counted | | Commodities | \~$3.1B | XAUT, PAXG | | Real estate | \~$175M | | | VC and private equity | \~$1.6B | | | Stablecoins | \~$303B | The settlement layer underneath every other row | Source: rwa.xyz, data as of 28 August 2026. ## Demand to borrow against RWAs Across DeFi, total deposits fell roughly 15 percent over the year. RWA deposits into DeFi lending went the other way and tripled, reaching $7.4B (CoinShares, Q2 2026). * **Aave Horizon**: by mid-2026, around $540M supplied and $163M borrowed against treasury and CLO tokens, with access permissioned. * **Morpho**: RWA deposits rose from almost nothing to around $400M during 2025, reached roughly $875M on Avalanche by March 2026, and $80M to $90M is already deployed on Robinhood Chain. * **Solana stock-token collateral** (Kamino, Jupiter Lend): around $53M by late July 2026. The figure is low because of structure, not appetite. Pooled markets are forced to keep single-stock exposure tightly capped. For scale, US margin debt on its own is above $900B, and securities-backed lending worldwide runs into the trillions, nearly all of it supplied to wealthy clients by private banks and prime brokers. ## Lessons from earlier RWA credit The last cycle showed plainly what fails: unsecured loans to borrowers no one could examine, covenants a chain has no means to enforce, concentration in a handful of obligors, and wrapper prices that could be manipulated. Spatial only writes overcollateralised loans, secured by liquid on-chain collateral with an oracle price. Recovery is a contract-run liquidation rather than a court claim. Each episode is examined in [the precedents the design responds to](/risk-and-safeguards/precedents.md). --- # Agent Instructions This documentation is published with GitBook. GitBook is the documentation platform designed so that both humans and AI agents can read, navigate, and reason over technical content effectively. 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