Estimating the TAM for onchain yield

A snapshot of how much onchain capital earns yield today – and how much is the opportunity size.

Nearly $2 trillion in assets live onchain today. Only about 13% of that capital earns any yield. In traditional finance, idle cash is the exception. Savings accounts, money markets, and treasury bills exist to ensure capital is almost always working. Onchain, the default is the opposite: the vast majority of crypto assets sit in wallets, on exchanges, or in cold storage, generating nothing.

The infrastructure to change this exists and is growing – staking networks, lending protocols, liquid staking derivatives, yield-bearing stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets. Some asset classes, like Ethereum, have seen meaningful adoption of yield infrastructure. Others, like Bitcoin, remain almost entirely untouched.

We measured widely adopted onchain asset categories to estimate how much of each is currently yield-productive, and examine the structural reasons behind the variation. All figures are a point-in-time snapshot sourced from DeFiLlama, StakingRewards, Dune Analytics, rwa.xyz, and individual protocol dashboards.

Yield by asset class

Across approximately $1,987 billion in adjusted onchain assets, roughly $268 billion is currently yield-productive.

The remaining ~$1,734 billion is idle. 

The variation across categories is striking. At one end, yield-bearing stablecoins and tokenized RWAs are productive by construction – holding them is earning yield. At the other extreme, Bitcoin sits at 1.6% utilization: an asset class larger than all others combined where almost nothing generates a return.

Ethereum and other L1s cluster around 30–35%, driven by staking. Stablecoins – the closest onchain equivalent to cash deposits – sit at just 11.4%.

Bitcoin: the largest untapped pool

Bitcoin's adjusted market cap of $1,128 billion – accounting for an estimated 15–20% of supply permanently lost – represents 57% of all addressable onchain assets. Yet only $17.9 billion earns yield, a 1.6% utilization rate. Nearly all yield-productive BTC exists as wrapped tokens deployed in DeFi on other chains:

WBTC: $8.0B (DeFiLlama)

cbBTC (Coinbase): $5.0B (DeFiLlama)

BTCB (Binance): $4.7B (DeFiLlama)

tBTC and others: ~$0.4B

Native Bitcoin DeFi – yield generated directly on Bitcoin's network – remains under $0.5B in total value locked. Bitcoin's base layer was not designed for programmability. It has no native smart contracts, and its scripting language is intentionally limited. Earning yield on BTC today requires bridging it to another chain, which introduces custodial trust assumptions and friction that most holders, particularly institutions, are unwilling to accept.

Ethereum and major L1s

Ethereum is the most mature onchain yield ecosystem. Of $220.9 billion in adjusted market cap, $76.1 billion (34.5%) is staked – 37.6 million ETH across 1.18 million validators, with Lido holding 23% of all staked ETH, and the broader liquid staking sector totaling $39.2 billion in TVL – roughly half of all staked ETH is wrapped in liquid staking tokens (stETH, rETH, cbETH) that can be redeployed across DeFi. Liquid staking turned staked capital from locked into composable, creating a second layer of yield on top of base staking rewards. 

Despite this progress, 65% of ETH remains unstaked – sitting on centralized exchanges, in cold wallets, or in smart contracts that don't generate staking yield. Ethereum's 34.5% staking rate is notably below the 50–75% range typical of most other PoS chains, suggesting significant room for growth even within crypto's most developed yield ecosystem. Across the ten other major PoS networks in scope – SOL, TRX, ADA, BNB, HYPE, AVAX, SUI, DOT, NEAR, and ATOM – a combined $97.7 billion is staked.

Staking ratios range from BNB's 12.4% to SUI's 76.7%, with most chains clustering in the 50–65% range. The variation reflects network maturity, the presence of liquid staking infrastructure, and whether exchange-held tokens are automatically staked on behalf of users. 

XRP ($122.4B market cap) is included in this category as the third-largest non-BTC/ETH onchain asset. It has no native staking mechanism, so its entire market cap is idle from a yield perspective.

Stablecoins and lending

The stablecoin market totals $313 billion, dominated by USDT ($183.9B, 59%) and USDC ($77.3B, 25%). Stablecoins are the closest onchain equivalent to cash – and in traditional finance, idle cash is almost unheard of. Roughly $35 billion is deployed in lending protocols, another $4.5 billion exists as yield-bearing stablecoins, and an estimated $12–18 billion sits in decentralized exchange liquidity pools such as Curve and Uniswap where stablecoins act as market-making capital.

The low utilization has several explanations. Much of the stablecoin supply is transactional – used for payments, trading, and cross-border transfers where yield is secondary to liquidity. A large share sits on centralized exchanges as dry powder, never touching DeFi. And for many holders, the perceived complexity and smart contract risk of lending protocols outweighs the 3–5% APY on offer. Lending activity concentrates in a handful of protocols. Aave leads with $16.5 billion in outstanding borrows, followed by Morpho ($3.8B), Compound ($1.3B), and Spark ($1.0B).

JustLend on Tron holds $3.3B in total supply but only $184M in borrows – a pattern consistent with Tron's role as a stablecoin transfer rail rather than a DeFi ecosystem. A caveat on lending data: protocol TVL and borrow figures include recursive positions, where users borrow and re-supply in loops to amplify exposure. The unique underlying capital base is lower than gross figures suggest, though the yield infrastructure services the full volume regardless. Yield-bearing stablecoins – tokens like sDAI, sUSDe, and similar – represent a model where yield is built into the token itself, removing the need for users to actively deposit into protocols. At $4.5 billion they are still small, but they address the core friction: making yield the default rather than the opt-in.

Tokenized real-world assets

Tokenized RWAs total $21.8 billion in onchain value. They are yield-productive by definition – structured to deliver returns from the moment they're minted. The breakdown: U.S. Treasuries ($11.1B), commodities including tokenized gold ($7.8B), private credit ($4.8B), institutional funds ($2.6B), and tokenized equities ($1.0B). While small relative to crypto-native categories, RWAs are significant for two reasons.

First, they represent net-new capital entering onchain infrastructure – assets that previously had no onchain presence at all. Second, they demonstrate the model: when assets are designed with yield built in, utilization is very close to 100%. The gap between RWAs at full utilization and stablecoins at 17.4% or BTC at 1.6% illustrates the difference infrastructure design makes.

Summary

The onchain yield infrastructure market today serves roughly $268 billion in productive capital out of approximately $2 trillion in addressable onchain assets – a 13.5% utilization rate. Three pools account for the majority of idle capital.

Bitcoin, at $1.1 trillion idle and 1.6% utilization, is by far the largest – constrained by the absence of native programmability and the friction of cross-chain bridging. Stablecoins, at $273 billion idle and 17.4% utilization, are the most natural candidate for yield but remain largely transactional. And unstaked ETH and L1 tokens – roughly $350 billion idle across all PoS assets – sit in the middle, where the infrastructure works but penetration has not yet reached the majority of supply.

The next phase of onchain financial infrastructure will focus on deploying existing capital productively and bringing new yield-bearing assets onchain. Systems that enable professional capital allocation across multiple strategies – or embed yield at the asset layer – are positioned to capture the largest pools of idle capital. As with RWAs and yield-bearing stablecoins today, utilization scales when capital can be put to work by default.

Methodology and caveats

Data snapshot: March 2026. All figures sourced from public dashboards and APIs.

Primary sources:
DeFiLlama (TVL, lending, stablecoin, chain data)
StakingRewards (staking ratios, APYs)
Dune Analytics (ETH staking breakdown)
rwa.xyz (tokenized RWA data)
Protocol-level dashboards (Aave, Morpho, JustLend, WBTC, etc.) for cross-validation.

Adjustments: Bitcoin addressable base reduced by ~17.5% for permanently lost coins (based on Chainalysis estimates of 3.7M+ BTC). Ethereum reduced by ~5% for lost ETH. No adjustment applied to other assets. XRP included as addressable but not yield-productive (no native staking).

Lending caveat: Protocol supply and borrow figures include recursive/looped positions. Unique capital base is lower than gross figures, but yield infrastructure services the full volume.

Exclusions: Centralized exchange yield products, off-chain lending, derivatives-based yield (perpetual funding rates), MEV revenue, token incentive programs. Scope is limited to  protocol-level, permissionless, onchain yield infrastructure.

Derivatives-based yield such as perpetual futures funding and basis trading are excluded. These strategies generate returns from trading activity rather than deploying underlying assets into productive infrastructure. While perpetual futures markets currently maintain roughly $100–130 billion in open interest, the capital involved represents trading margin rather than idle asset balances, making it structurally different from staking or lending yield.