- Stellar is one of the most underrated chains, which is quietly making a huge splash in the institutional RWA tokenization arena.
- XLM’s native ledger has grown its RWA portfolio to over $1.81 billion in total value, reflecting a 12,023% growth in barely five years.
People often compare Stellar (XLM) with XRP. After all, they share a common DNA tracing back to Jed McCaleb, one of the architects of XRP and co-founder of Ripple. A disagreement with his original team eventually led to his creation of Stellar.
Stellar’s code initially utilized the XRP Ledger (XRPL) during launch in 2014. However, it eventually forked and migrated to its proprietary Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), enabling it to tailor-fit its solution for decentralized, non-profit purposes. The ground-up rewrite of the network’s codebase eventually erased all traces of its original code from XRPL.
Stellar’s Rise in RWAs
XRP positioned itself primarily as a bridge currency for liquidity, making it a key commodity for cross-border payments, settlements, remittances, and more. Meanwhile, Stellar focused on building itself as a platform for the issuance and exchange of digital representations of value, even from the start.
Like XRPL, Stellar is one of the fastest-growing chains for tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs). As of RWA.xyz’s snapshot on April 8, 2026, XLM’s native ledger has grown its RWA portfolio to over $1.81 billion in total value. The figures reflect more than 12,023% increase from its $14.93 million valuation in September 2021.
RWA Tokenization
Tokenized RWAs are undoubtedly the next big leap in finance. It fuses traditional real-world assets with the benefits of blockchain. The mechanism unlocks deep liquidity, fractional ownership, more accessibility, and higher transparency for market participants.
RWA tokenization involves converting ownership rights of physical or traditional financial assets into digital tokens on a blockchain. Some key examples include money market funds, commodities, private credit, and real estate.
Top RWA Projects in Stellar
Stellar is one of the most underrated chains, as people tend to focus on higher-market-cap chains. To date, XLM sits in the top 20 of the crypto market rankings in terms of overall valuation, with its 33.1 billion circulating supply giving it a market cap between $5.054 billion and $5.236 billion over the last 24 hours heading to April 10, 2026.
Nonetheless, Stellar has been quietly repositioning itself as it grows in institutional adoption. The network now has an RWA count of 58, with 10,536 RWA holders and a transfer volume of $143.35 million over the last 30 days.
1. Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund: Most RWA Value Held in Stellar
Franklin Templeton, one of the world’s largest asset management firms with $1.68 trillion in assets under management (AUM), has been heavily leveraging Stellar for the Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund (BENJI). The US-regulated money market fund for institutions has a total value of $1.011 billion, serves 1,098 holders, and has a monthly transfer volume of $1.61 million.
The token maintains a net asset value of $1, with a management fee of 0.15%. Its annual percentage yield (APY) over the last 30 days is 3.4%.
Stellar has received a major stamp of approval from the financial giant, as Franklin Templeton entrusted over 65% of BENJI’s issuance on the chain, totaling $658.36 million. The numbers show a significant leap from the company’s $2.93 million in tokens initially issued under the network.
Franklin Templeton distributed the remaining BENJI tokens across BNB Chain (BNB), Base (BASE), Arbitrum (ARB), Ethereum (ETH), Avalanche (AVAX) C-Chain, and Polygon (POL).
2. Spiko: Second-Largest in RWA Value in Stellar
Spiko is a French fintech company specializing in RWA tokenization and treasury solutions. The platform boasts offering the world’s first fully-licensed tokenized money market funds. Its most popular assets are the Spiko EU T-Bills Money Market Fund and Spiko Amundi Overnight Swap Fund (EUR).
Like Franklin Templeton, the startup founded by former French Treasury officials has chosen Stellar as its main chain for token issuance. Additionally, Spiko manages roughly 41.54% of its tokens, or $597.3 million, via XLM’s ledger.
The rest of Spiko’s $1.438 billion worth of tokens are coursed through Arbitrum, Polygon, Ethereum, and Base. The platform is one of the most active on the RWA market, processing approximately $486.86 million in monthly transfer volume.
3. USDC: Top Stablecoin Asset in Stellar
Circle’s USDC, a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, has a market cap of $75.14 billion. It processes an astonishing $8.69 trillion in monthly transfer volume across 40.56 million holders and 18.54 million monthly active addresses.
USDC has the highest market cap among other assets utilizing the Stellar chain. Around $256.16 million worth of the asset flows across the ledger, making it the third-largest project by accumulated value.
4. WisdomTree and Mercado Bitcoin: Most RWA Count Across Stellar
WisdomTree, an investment manager and exchange-traded fund (ETF) solutions provider, and Mercado Bitcoin, a digital asset exchange, are tied for the most RWA count in Stellar, with 16 projects each.
On the other hand, compared to the first three projects shown here, they account for only $35 million and $8 million to Stellar, respectively—significantly lower than those projects’ contributions.
What Makes Stellar Ideal for Institutional RWA Tokenization Projects
Stellar stands as a top choice for established powerhouses in both traditional and on-chain finance, thanks to its diverse set of base-layer features. These include the following:
1. Streamlined Asset Issuance
Stellar’s RWA issuance is built directly into the protocol as a native function. Its asset logic is not governed by complex elements such as the often-vulnerable ERC-20 smart contracts on Ethereum.
2. Regulatory Compliance
Institutions leverage Stellar’s standardized protocols, which can scale even under stringent Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements from regulators. As a bonus, it has endpoints that allow issuers to plug in clawback and other permissioned controls to freeze, recover, or seize assets, which comes in handy when working with enforcement authorities to recover stolen, laundered, sanctioned, or otherwise illegally obtained assets.
3. Low Fees and High Throughput
Transaction fees on Stellar are nominal, starting from 0.00001 XLM. Moreover, its high throughput enables almost instant settlement of transactions in as little as three to five seconds.
4. Native DEX
Furthermore, the Stellar ledger’s core code has a decentralized exchange (DEX) as a native feature. It was the first Layer 1 blockchain to implement such a function, paving the way for atomic swaps among different tokenized assets without intermediaries or third-party applications.
5. Soroban Upgrade
Before Soroban, Stellar was a specialized chain for payments and simple tokenization. With the upgrade, the network now competes directly with Ethereum and Solana (SOL) for complex DeFi applications.
