By Eco research. Updated May 2026.
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Real-world asset (RWA) tokens are blockchain representations of offchain financial instruments — Treasury bills, private credit loans, real estate equity, gold bars, public equities, and retired carbon credits. By Q1 2026, rwa.xyz tracks more than $30B in tokenized assets across six categories, led by tokenized U.S. Treasuries (BlackRock BUIDL, Ondo USDY, Franklin BENJI, WisdomTree WTGXX) and private credit (Maple, Goldfinch, Centrifuge). This guide walks the six live RWA categories, the issuers behind them, the regulatory wrappers (Reg D, Reg S, MiFID II), and the chains where each token settles.
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RWA tokens are ERC-20, ERC-1400, or SPL tokens that represent legal claims on offchain assets held by a regulated custodian or special purpose vehicle. Holders earn the underlying asset's economics — Treasury yield, loan interest, rent, gold spot exposure, or equity dividends — while transferring the token onchain. Most RWA tokens are permissioned: KYC-gated, accredited-only, or jurisdiction-restricted.
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The category sits at roughly $30B onchain in Q1 2026 per rwa.xyz, up from under $5B at the start of 2024. DeFiLlama's RWA dashboard tracks a similar TVL footprint across protocols that mint or distribute these tokens. Growth concentrates in two segments: tokenized Treasuries (regulated money-market exposure for crypto-native treasuries) and tokenized private credit (yield products for funds and DAOs).
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RWA tokens are distinct from crypto-collateralized stablecoins like GHO and from synthetic-yield stablecoins like sUSDe. RWAs derive yield from external cash flows; stablecoins derive theirs from onchain mechanisms or, in some cases, from RWAs held in reserve.
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An issuer establishes a special purpose vehicle (SPV) or licensed fund that holds the offchain asset — a portfolio of T-bills, a pool of private loans, a deed to a property. The SPV mints tokens representing pro-rata claims on that asset. A transfer agent maintains the cap table; a smart contract enforces transfer restrictions (whitelists, jurisdiction blocks, lockups). Yield reaches holders through onchain rebases, secondary token distributions, or redemption at NAV.
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Most issuers use a permissioned ERC-20 variant or the ERC-1400 security token standard, which adds transfer-restriction hooks. BlackRock's BUIDL, for example, only transfers between addresses pre-approved by Securitize, the registered transfer agent. Ondo's USDY uses a similar whitelist enforced at the contract level. Franklin Templeton's BENJI lives on Stellar, Polygon, and Ethereum and tracks shares of the FOBXX money market fund with a transfer agent recording every move.
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The RWA market splits into six live categories: tokenized Treasuries, tokenized private credit, tokenized real estate, tokenized commodities (gold first), tokenized equities, and tokenized carbon credits. Each category has different issuers, regulatory wrappers, ticket sizes, and chain support. The table below summarizes leading issuers and approximate AUM per rwa.xyz Q1 2026 readings.

Tokenized Treasury products wrap shares of money-market funds or short-duration T-bill portfolios. BlackRock's BUIDL launched March 2024 with Securitize as transfer agent; per DeFiLlama and rwa.xyz, supply sits at $2.8B in Q2 2026, distributing daily yield to whitelisted holders on Ethereum, Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon. Ondo's USDY (covered in detail in the tokenized treasuries comparison) sits at $2.1B per DeFiLlama Q2 2026 and uses a Reg S wrapper for non-U.S. retail. Franklin Templeton's BENJI tracks the FOBXX fund — a registered '40 Act money-market fund — and is the only RWA token of meaningful size offered to U.S. retail. WisdomTree's WTGXX takes a similar registered-fund approach.
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Private credit was the second category to find product-market fit onchain. Maple Finance originates secured loans to crypto-native trading firms and tokenizes the loan-pool LP positions; pool managers underwrite borrowers and post collateral schedules onchain. Goldfinch lends unsecured to emerging-market fintechs through "borrower pool" contracts with offchain credit committees. Centrifuge tokenizes invoices and trade-finance receivables through Tinlake pools, with senior/junior tranching enforced onchain. rwa.xyz's private-credit dashboard tracks roughly $13B in active loans across the category as of Q1 2026.
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Real estate tokens fractionalize equity in single properties or property portfolios. RealT mints LLC-interest tokens for U.S. rental homes (predominantly Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago) on Gnosis Chain, distributing rent in xDai weekly. Lofty offers similar fractionalized rental exposure on Algorand. Propy tokenizes title to specific properties as NFTs and has handled real-estate closings using onchain title transfer. Volumes remain modest — about $200M across the category per rwa.xyz — because property tokenization runs into local recording-office requirements that don't yet read onchain claims.
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Gold is the only commodity with meaningful onchain liquidity. Paxos's PAXG (each token representing one fine troy ounce held in Brink's vaults) operates under a New York Department of Financial Services trust charter; reserves are attested monthly. Tether Gold (XAUT) follows the same one-token-per-ounce model with vaulting in Switzerland and trades at roughly $4,565 per token in Q2 2026 with a $2.7B market cap per CoinGecko, tracking gold spot. Both settle on Ethereum, with XAUT also on Tron. Tokenized oil, silver, and softs exist as small experiments but lack the redemption infrastructure that gold has built up.
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Tokenized public equities wrap shares of listed companies into onchain instruments. Backed Finance, regulated under Liechtenstein's TVTG (Token and Trusted Technology Service Provider Act), issues bToken wrappers for stocks like NVDA, MSTR, and TSLA, plus ETF wrappers like CSPX. Each bToken is fully collateralized by the underlying share held in a regulated custodian and redeemable at NAV. Dinari issues "dShares" under Reg D 506(c) for accredited U.S. investors. Ondo Global Markets, announced in early 2025, expands the same model with broader index exposure on Ethereum, Solana, and Arbitrum. The category is small (sub-$500M onchain per rwa.xyz) but growing as DeFi protocols accept tokenized equities as collateral.
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Tokenized carbon takes credits from voluntary registries (Verra, Gold Standard) and bridges them onchain as ERC-20s. Toucan operates the largest bridge — credits become BCT (Base Carbon Tonnes) and NCT (Nature Carbon Tonnes). KlimaDAO buys and retires credits using its KLIMA token treasury. Moss issues MCO2, each token backed by one verified carbon credit. The market shrank sharply after Verra restricted Toucan's bridging in 2023; live onchain volume sits below $100M per Toucan's Dune dashboard, and most activity has shifted toward direct-to-corporate retirement rails.
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U.S. and EU securities laws treat almost every yield-bearing RWA as a security. Issuers use Reg D 506(c) (accredited U.S. only, general solicitation allowed), Reg S (non-U.S. only), or '40 Act registered-fund wrappers to stay compliant. Smart contracts enforce these rules with whitelists at the transfer-agent level; addresses must complete KYC with Securitize, Tokeny, or a similar provider before they can hold or transfer the token.
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Three of the four major Treasury issuers — BUIDL, USDY, and WTGXX — gate access to accredited investors or non-U.S. persons. Franklin's BENJI is the major retail-accessible exception because FOBXX is already a publicly registered money-market fund. Backed Finance's bTokens are accessible to retail outside the U.S. under EU prospectus rules, but blocked from U.S. addresses. Carbon credit tokens and gold tokens are the least restricted because the underlying assets aren't securities — PAXG and XAUT trade on retail exchanges including Kraken and Bitfinex.
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Ethereum hosts the deepest RWA liquidity by issuance volume — BUIDL, USDY, BENJI, PAXG, XAUT, and most Backed bTokens settle there. Polygon catches institutional issuers (BENJI, Hamilton Lane, Apollo) drawn to lower fees. Solana has emerged as a second hub for tokenized Treasuries (Ondo, Franklin) and tokenized equities (Dinari, Ondo GM) because order-flow firms want the low-latency settlement. Aptos and Stellar host BUIDL and BENJI respectively as part of multichain expansions. Avalanche's Evergreen subnets are configured for permissioned RWA flows and host Apollo, JPMorgan Onyx, and BlackRock pilots. Provenance Blockchain holds about $1.3B in TVL per DeFiLlama, almost all of which is Figure's tokenized HELOC and consumer-loan portfolio.
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Cross-chain transfer of permissioned RWAs is harder than transferring a standard ERC-20. Whitelist state has to follow the token across chains, or the destination chain's transfer agent has to issue a parallel claim. Eco Routes provides stablecoin-denominated settlement infrastructure that can move USDC into and out of these chains for RWA purchase and redemption flows.
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Stablecoins like USDC and USDT hold short-duration assets in reserve but pass none of the yield to holders. Yield-bearing stables (sUSDS, sUSDe, USDY) layer yield on top of a stable peg. RWA tokens like BUIDL or BENJI pass yield through directly but are securities, not stablecoins — their share price floats slightly with NAV accrual rather than rebasing, and they don't target a $1 peg the way USDC does.
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For a yield-seeker, the practical decision tree is: (1) do you need spendable, freely transferrable balances? Use stablecoins. (2) Do you want yield on a stable balance with crypto-native composability? Use sUSDS, sUSDe, or aUSDC. (3) Do you want regulated Treasury exposure with offchain-asset backing and direct NAV claims? Use BUIDL, USDY, BENJI, or WTGXX. (4) Do you want exposure to non-Treasury cash flows (private credit, real estate, equities, gold)? Use the relevant category-specific issuer. Yield aggregators increasingly route across these tiers, blending stablecoin and RWA exposure in a single vault position.
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Eco Routes settles stablecoin transfers across 15 chains, including the Ethereum, Base, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Optimism deployments where most RWA tokens live. Funds, treasuries, and DAOs use Routes to move USDC into the chain where a tokenized Treasury or private-credit pool accepts subscriptions, and back out to a settlement chain at redemption. The token itself stays permissioned on the issuer's chain; Eco moves the stablecoin leg.
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Sources and methodology. AUM and TVL pulled from rwa.xyz and DeFiLlama RWA dashboard in May 2026. Stablecoin and gold-token caps from DeFiLlama stablecoins and CoinGecko. Issuer disclosures verified against Securitize, Backed Finance docs, Maple, and Centrifuge. Figures refresh quarterly.
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