Real-world assets and tokenized treasuries, and what they are not

A real-world asset token is an entry on a blockchain that represents a claim on something that exists outside it: a fund share, a loan, a bond, a warehouse of metal. The chain is an accurate register of who holds the claim and a poor enforcer of it, because the asset itself sits with a custodian and the claim is a matter of contract law. Everything distinctive about this category follows from that split.

The stack behind one token

A typical structure has four layers. An issuing entity, often a special purpose vehicle in a jurisdiction chosen for its rules on segregation of assets, holds legal title to the underlying. A regulated custodian holds the asset itself, so that the issuer's own insolvency does not reach it. A transfer agent or registrar maintains the authoritative record of ownership. And a token contract mirrors that record on chain, usually with a permission list built in, because the issuer is legally obliged to know who its holders are.

Tokenization, in this sense, does not remove intermediaries; it changes what the intermediaries do and how quickly the register updates. The token can settle in seconds at any hour, but a redemption still moves cash through a banking system with opening hours, and a court asked to rule on the claim will read the offering documents, not the ledger. Where the two disagree, the documents win.

Tokenized treasuries and how the return reaches a holder

The largest category in practice is short-dated government debt, held either directly by a vehicle or through a tokenized money market fund. The token is a share in that fund. Its net asset value is calculated by the administrator on the fund's own schedule, and the return reaches holders in one of two ways: the share count increases, or the redemption value per share increases. The mechanics are the same two designs used by liquid staking receipts, and they compose with other contracts equally differently.

Three constraints define the instrument. Holders are gated by know your customer checks and often by accredited investor or professional-client status, so the transfer function will reject an unapproved address. Subscription and redemption follow the fund's cut-off times, which is why a token that trades continuously can still take a business day or more to convert into cash. And the shares are securities in most jurisdictions that have addressed the question, which places them inside a regulatory perimeter that stablecoins were designed to sit outside of. In the European Union, MiCA entered application in 2024 and explicitly leaves instruments that qualify as financial instruments to existing securities law rather than covering them itself.

How this differs from a stablecoin

The row that most often surprises people is the third. A fiat-backed stablecoin generally does not pass the return on its reserves to holders, which is precisely why it can be freely transferable and is generally not treated as a fund share. A tokenized fund passes that return through and takes on the obligations that come with doing so. The two are not competing versions of the same product.

Beyond fund shares, the category extends to private credit, invoice financing, real estate interests and commodities held in a vault. These are harder cases for the same reason: the underlying has no continuous market price, so the on-chain valuation is an appraisal produced at intervals by a party with an interest in the outcome, and a default is discovered rather than observed. Where a treasury fund's holdings are marked against a deep public market, a loan book is marked against a model, and the token inherits whichever it is built on.

What breaks, and what tokenization cannot fix

• The claim is off chain. If the issuer, the custodian or the borrower behind a private credit position fails, the token holder is a creditor in an ordinary proceeding. Counterparty risk is not reduced by being recorded on a blockchain, only made easier to observe.
• The price is an oracle. An on-chain valuation of an off-chain asset is a report, produced on the administrator's timetable. Using it as collateral inherits every property of that off-chain data feed, including the fact that it may not update during a market dislocation.
• Permission lists break composability. A token that can only move between approved addresses cannot be liquidated by an arbitrary liquidator, cannot sit in an open pool, and cannot be used by a contract that has not been whitelisted. Much of the machinery described elsewhere in this track simply does not apply.
• Tokenized is not bearer. The registrar can freeze, reissue after a key loss, or reverse a transfer if the law requires it. That is a feature for a regulated instrument and a reversal of the property most often claimed for tokens.
• Continuous trading is not continuous redemption. Secondary market liquidity at three in the morning is a market maker's balance sheet, not the fund's.

The treasuries and stablecoin pages carry supply and structure data for both categories, with circulating stablecoin supply and peg deviation among the series that make the difference between the instruments visible. The methodology notes explain which vehicles are counted where, which matters more here than in any other part of the industry, because the same underlying treasury bill can appear behind a fund share, behind a stablecoin reserve and behind an exchange-traded product at the same time.