Real World Assets (RWA)
Traditional assets — T-bills, credit, funds — issued as on-chain tokens; institutional finance's actual crypto adoption story.
RWA tokenization puts traditional financial assets on-chain: tokenized US Treasury funds (BlackRock’s BUIDL among the flagships), private credit, commodities and money-market products. Holders get 24/7 transferable tokens with yields from the underlying assets — blending TradFi cash flows with crypto rails.
This became the institutions’ favored on-ramp: tokenized Treasuries grew into a multi-billion-dollar category, and 2026 accelerated the trend — the SEC published a tokenized-securities taxonomy in January and DTC is piloting tokenization in H2. Distinctions matter: RWAs carry issuer, custodian and legal-claim risk that pure crypto assets don’t, and most are permissioned (KYC-gated) tokens. Related: tokenized stocks.