Some Crypto Yield Now Comes From an Actual US Treasury Bond. Here's How Tokenized Real-World Assets (RWA) Work
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7 min read
You have probably seen a token like BUIDL, BENJI or USDY advertised with a yield that sounds almost boring next to crypto's usual promises, something in the low single digits, paid every day. That is not an accident, and it is not coming from trading fees or a lending pool. It is coming from an actual US Treasury bill, held by a real fund manager, off-chain. Tokenized real-world assets (RWA) are what happens when a traditional financial asset like that Treasury bill gets a blockchain token wrapped around it, and understanding where that yield really comes from is the only way to judge what you are actually trusting.
A tokenized real-world asset is a blockchain token that represents ownership, or a claim on the cash flow, of something that exists entirely off-chain: a Treasury bill, a corporate loan, a piece of private credit, sometimes even real estate. The token itself has no independent value. It is a digital receipt. Its value depends entirely on whoever is holding the real asset behind it and whether they do what they say they will do.
This is a different kind of crypto asset than Bitcoin or Ethereum. A Bitcoin's value comes from the network itself. An RWA token's value comes from a person or company you have to trust, the issuer, plus whoever is physically holding the underlying asset for safekeeping, the custodian. That distinction is the entire subject of this article.
The largest category of RWA by far is tokenized US Treasuries, tokens backed by short-term US government debt. The mechanism is simple: a fund buys Treasury bills or holds them in repurchase agreements, and the interest that debt pays gets distributed to token holders, usually daily, through the token's own smart contract. No trading, no lending pool, no crypto-native yield source at all. It is the same interest the US government pays on any of its short-term debt, just distributed through a token instead of a brokerage statement.
That is why this category has grown so fast. Tokenized US Treasury funds held more than $15 billion combined by mid-2026, up from $13.4 billion just a few months earlier in April, according to BloomingBit. Three funds dominate it, and they are built for very different buyers.
| Fund | Issuer | Size (mid-2026) | Who can actually buy it |
|---|---|---|---|
| BUIDL | BlackRock | $2.8 billion, the largest single fund (BloomingBit) | Institutions only, $5 million minimum |
| BENJI | Franklin Templeton | Grew from $828 million in Q1 2026, backing the Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund | US retail investors, $20 minimum, via the Benji Investments app |
| OUSG / USDY | Ondo Finance | Two separate products from the same issuer | OUSG needs $5,000 to $100,000 and US qualified-purchaser status; USDY is built for non-US retail investors with a roughly $50 minimum |
BENJI is worth a closer look because of what it represents structurally, not just its low minimum. It is the token for the Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund, a mutual fund registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission under the Investment Company Act of 1940, the same law that governs an ordinary US money-market fund. In August 2026, the SEC issued a no-action letter allowing Franklin Templeton's own other registered mutual funds and ETFs to hold BENJI for cash management, under Section 17(f) and Rule 17f-2 of that Act, reported by The Block and independently by crypto.news. That is a regulator treating a tokenized fund's custody structure as equivalent to a traditional one, which is a meaningfully different level of oversight than most crypto products ever get.
Note what none of this changes: BENJI and OUSG's non-instant tier are not currently open to Indonesian retail investors, and BUIDL never was. USDY is the one product in this table aimed at non-US retail, so it is the one worth checking eligibility on directly with the issuer before assuming access.
Treasury-backed RWA yield is about as close to risk-free as crypto gets, because the underlying asset is US government debt. That is not true of the next-largest RWA category, tokenized private credit, where platforms like Centrifuge, Maple Finance and Goldfinch put on-chain money into loans made to real businesses. The yield is higher because the credit risk is real, and 2026 gave that risk a live test: Fitch's private credit default index hit a record 6.0% in the second quarter, even as loan issuance across the industry fell roughly 40% to about $44.8 billion in the same quarter, per Crypto Briefing and independently Credit and Collection News.
Tokenized private credit already lived through its own version of this. In 2021, Goldfinch lent $5 million to Tugende Kenya, a motorcycle-taxi financing company, only to discover Tugende had quietly moved $1.9 million of that loan to its struggling Ugandan parent company, breaking the loan's own terms. The loan defaulted, Goldfinch's DAO treasury had to cover part of the loss, and the loan was eventually restructured to recover what it could, reported by DL News and Yahoo Finance.
The label "real-world asset" can sound like it means "safer than crypto." It only means the yield's source lives off-chain. Whether that makes a specific token safer or riskier depends entirely on what the real asset actually is, and how much you trust the specific issuer and custodian standing behind it. A Treasury-backed token like BUIDL or BENJI inherits the credit quality of the US government. A private-credit token inherits the credit quality of whatever business borrowed the money, which can be a small operator on another continent you have no way to evaluate yourself.
The questions worth asking before touching any RWA token are the same three every time: who is the issuer, who is the custodian holding the actual asset, and what happens to your token if either one fails. If a product cannot answer those three questions clearly, the "real world asset" label is doing more marketing work than informing you.
Before treating any advertised yield as free money, whether it comes from an RWA token, a DeFi lending pool or a stablecoin, look at what mechanism is actually generating it. NetWort's Explore screener lets you filter across asset types and compare volatility and drawdown side by side, a faster way to see how a token like Ondo, the company behind OUSG and USDY, has actually traded than reading its marketing page. If you are also weighing crypto-native yield sources, the DeFi lending yield and stablecoin yield breakdowns cover the risks specific to those, which are different from the issuer and custody risk this article covers.