Tokenized assets (RWA) are taking a crucial step from being 'holdable and tradable' to 'functional and utility-generating,' enabling real credit expansion on-chain. Just saw Aave officially announce a few days ago: Aave V4 has launched Equities Hub on Base, supporting 7 tokenized U.S. stocks issued by Coinbase as collateral to borrow USDC. The 7 supported tokenized stocks are: AAPLc, AMZNc, GOOGLc, METAc, MSFTc, NVDAc, TSLAc, using Chainlink as the oracle. This is a big deal: TradFi and DeFi are merging even further. Previously, tokenized stocks were mainly tools for holding and trading. Now, they can directly serve as DeFi lending collateral, allowing holders to access USD liquidity without selling their stocks—similar to margin lending in traditional brokerages, but on-chain and with greater transparency. Aave founder Stani Kulechov put it perfectly: tokenized stocks used to be just for holding or trading, but now you can borrow against them. Last year, we also talked about how DeFi had been somewhat stagnant in recent years. The core reason? There were too few high-quality assets on-chain. Lending and derivatives were mostly centered around $BTC, $ETH, and a few other major tokens, while smaller tokens couldn’t qualify as high-quality collateral or foundational assets. The lack of qualified collateral and quality underlying assets has kept DeFi’s growth stagnant. But imagine if more high-quality assets become available in the future—the scale of on-chain lending and derivatives could expand to massive levels, far beyond what we see today. The same tokenized asset: Some people hold it for investment, some use it as LP, and others use it for financing. Then, options markets and structured products grow around these positions. This is the key to expanding the scale of on-chain finance. The scale of traditional finance has never been just about how much stock is traded daily. The bigger part comes from collateralized financing, margin trading, derivatives, and asset management. DeFi has been doing these things too, but most of the underlying assets have come from within the crypto ecosystem. With RWA entering the space, credit expansion can now be built on treasuries, index ETFs, and corporate stocks, providing the entire system with a new source of assets. We’ve also talked before about tokenized U.S. stocks (meme stocks), which help fill the gap in foundational assets on-chain: https://(x.com)/qinbafrank/status/2095094140031689161?s=46&t=k6rimWsEbo2D2tXolYcM-A