Santiment's RWA rankings consistently place Hedera, Chainlink, and Avalanche at the top

Blockchain analytics firm Santiment has published several rankings of real-world asset development activity in 2025 and 2026, with each measurement period consistently placing Hedera, Chainlink, and Avalanche in the top three positions.

7/24/20265 min read

What does Santiment's growth performance index measure?

Santiment's development activity score tracks noteworthy daily activity on GitHub over a 30-day period, drawing data directly from project repositories via Sanbase. This metric counts significant commits, pull request merges, documentation updates, and repository contributions from project development teams, filtering out signals instead of noise by excluding minor formatting changes and automated maintenance commits that inflate raw commit counts without reflecting true technical output.

The value of this metric as an analytical signal lies precisely in what it doesn't measure. Development activity doesn't directly correlate with token price performance, doesn't reflect marketing spending or the frequency of collaboration announcements, and doesn't reward teams for generating social media engagement without releasing code. Crypto-Economy has directly described this metric: it represents "the genuine commitment of developers on GitHub, not simply price volatility." During a period when the cryptocurrency market as a whole is experiencing significant price declines, the development activity ranking identifies which teams continue building infrastructure regardless of token price performance, a particularly useful signal for assessing which projects are positioning themselves for institutional adoption rather than managing speculative trading narratives.

The consistent presence of Hedera, Chainlink, and Avalanche across various timeframes suggests a sustainable technical investment model rather than just a single-period surge, which distinguishes these protocols from projects whose development activity is focused on the launch or token upgrade phase and then declines to maintenance.

Hedera: Business and Organizational Management Hashgraph

Hedera's consistent leading position in Santiment's RWA rankings reflects sustained technical productivity across its entire development ecosystem, encompassing not only Hedera's core protocol development team but also the Hashgraph Association and the broader community of enterprise partners actively building tokenized applications on the network. The network's governance structure, with founding board members including Google, IBM, Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, LG Electronics, and other Fortune 500 companies, provides a consistent signal of institutional demand for RWA-related protocol capabilities that smaller or less institutionally embedded networks cannot replicate.

Recent enterprise deployments demonstrate that development activity translates into production applications, not just remaining in the proof-of-concept phase. Hedera has been appointed as the official blockchain partner of the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Racing Team and the Arrow McLaren IndyCar Racing Team, a corporate sponsorship that extends the network's institutional brand prestige into mainstream media visibility. More specifically, in line with RWA's argument, Hedera's hashgraph consensus architecture provides validation within three to five seconds with transaction costs measured in fractions of a cent—characteristics that enterprise tokenized applications need for practical deployment at organizational scale, but which many alternative networks cannot consistently deliver under real-world operating conditions.

Chainlink: Oracle Infrastructure is a Crucial Pathway for RWA

Chainlink's consistent top 2 position reflects its role as the foundational data infrastructure that enables almost every RWA tokenized application to function reliably. A tokenized bond needs real-time interest rate data, a tokenized real estate fund needs asset valuation data feeds, a tokenized commodity needs price verification against the physical market: each of these applications relies on oracle infrastructure to connect information existing off-chain with smart contracts that govern the token's on-chain behavior.

Chainlink's CCIP, Data Streams, and Proof of Reserve products are integrated into the operational infrastructure of RWA deployments across multiple chains simultaneously. Chainlink doesn't build RWA applications itself, but rather builds connections that enable reliable operation of RWA applications from other teams. This architectural positioning means that Chainlink's development activity increases as the number and complexity of RWA deployments across the ecosystem grow, creating a synergistic relationship between ecosystem adoption and Chainlink's protocol development requirements.

Avalanche: Subnetting Architecture and Deployment for Organizational Asset Managers

Avalanche's stable third-place position reflects its sustained technical investment in subnet infrastructure, which has become the mainstream architectural choice for institutional asset managers seeking to deploy tokenized products on a dedicated, compliance-controlled blockchain environment. The core advantage of the subnet model for institutional RWA deployments is that it allows an organization to operate a purpose-built blockchain environment with its own validator, fee structure, and governance rules, while maintaining interoperability with Avalanche's mainnet and the broader ecosystem of liquidity and tools built on the C-Chain.

Institutional deployments of RWAs on Avalanche in 2026 demonstrate that this architecture works at significant production scale. Japan's largest security token platform, Progmat, announced the transfer of over $2 billion in tokenized assets to Avalanche L1. Galaxy Digital tokenized its first CLO on the network with an initial investment of $50 million from Grove. Fosun Wealth launched a yielding RWA stablecoin in Asia. The Avalanche Foundation's Retro9000 program rewarded developers based on verifiable on-chain usage rather than subjective criteria, encouraging real-world application deployments rather than protocol-level testing. The partnership between SBI Holdings and Solana Foundation, announced on July 13th, also highlights the competitive landscape of Avalanche, as institutional investors are choosing between competing blockchain ecosystems to deploy RWAs, and development performance rankings provide a signal of which ecosystems are investing technical resources in the capabilities demanded by institutional clients.

Assessment and Conclusion

The fact that four projects account for approximately 70% of observable RWA development activity suggests a concentrated pattern with specific implications for assessing the trajectory of the RWA sector. This concentration is not a temporary phenomenon, as the projects are in upgrade cycles during the measurement period: Santiment data shows that Hedera, Chainlink, and Avalanche consistently maintained their top three positions throughout November 2025 and several measurement periods in 2026, a sustainability reflecting the true standing of the organizations rather than short-term growth spurts.

The sharp decline in the leading group, from Stellar's 110.9% to IOTA's 79.1%, then Chia's 46.73%, and VeChain's 21.6%, suggests that the RWA development landscape features a group of top protocols receiving sustained institutional-level technical investment, and a second and third group where development activity continues but at a much lower intensity than the top platforms. The gap between these tiers is widening rather than narrowing, indicating that institutional partnerships, proven track records, and product deployment experience are creating synergistic advantages, making it increasingly difficult for second-tier protocols to close the gap with the leading ones.

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