A Thin Conduit: Market Segmentation, Credit-Stress Transmission, and Flow Fragility in Tokenized Real-World Assets

Tokenized real-world-asset (RWA) markets, in which blockchain tokens grant claims on off-chain loans, Treasury portfolios, and listed securities, reached USD 9.26 billion in May 2026 across twelve public-chain protocols. Using 9081 protocol-day observations from DefiLlama and FRED (December 2020–June 2026), we ask how closely weekly changes in total value locked (TVL), our proxy for net flows, track traditional credit conditions. The evidence is suggestive. A one-percentage-point widening of the Moody’s Baa default spread is associated with a 0.36 log-point weekly contraction in TVL, stable in sign across stress measures, TVL floors, and leave-one-protocol-out samples, but imprecise with twelve clusters (wild cluster bootstrap p = 0.15) and smaller under outlier treatment. The association is concentrated in the five vehicles holding uncollateralized real-economy loans (−0.62; five clusters, bootstrap p = 0.10–0.12) and small among tokenized-Treasury vehicles, but a formal interaction test places the difference at the margin of significance and finds none within the 2023–2026 window in which both groups coexist. Event studies around four stress episodes show economically large but statistically insignificant contractions after Terra/Luna and FTX and none after the 2024 yen-carry unwind. We offer market segmentation as one interpretation and draw cautious implications for supervision.