RegulationBlockchain
|5 min ReadFrom BUIDL to OUSG: the on-chain Treasury trade is here
Maya Chen
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
The shift is real, and it is moving fast
This market is bigger than hype. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries are the most active and fastest growing corner of real-world assets. Institutions are already here. Demand on-chain is real and rising. BlackRock’s BUIDL sits at several billion dollars and can be used as derivatives collateral. Access is still gated to whitelisted, qualified investors. That will not stop the flow.
Larry Fink put it plainly. “Every stock, every bond, every fund, every asset can be tokenized.” Stablecoins lit the fuse. RWAs are the blast. They move the financial back office to public blockchains and cut out slow, opaque pipes built in the 1970s.
Look at the legacy stack. Too many intermediaries, slow settlement, low transparency, high compliance costs. Blockchain fixes the plumbing. You get near-instant settlement, programmable contracts, direct ownership, better transparency, lower costs, and fractional investing. That is how money scales on-chain.
Regulators and brands are leaning in. Robinhood is pushing stock trading over its own chain and has sent the SEC a proposal on an RWA framework. BlackRock partnered with Securitize to launch BUIDL, a tokenized money market fund around $2.4 billion. Paul Atkins at the SEC has voiced support for stock tokens, and crypto working groups are meeting on RWA policy.
The numbers tell you where we are in the curve. As of Aug. 23, 2025, tokenized RWAs reached $26.5 billion. That is up 112 percent year over year, 253 percent in two years, 783 percent in three. The fastest lanes are U.S. Treasuries and private credit, followed by commodities, institutional funds, and equities.
Why Treasuries lead the RWA wave
Treasuries dominate because the product fits the chain. Liquidity is overwhelming. Credit risk is minimal. Yields sit around 4 percent. Global investors can reach it more easily. Big managers add trust and pipes. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and WisdomTree push tokenized money market and Treasury products. That gives everyone a clean wrapper to hold yield.
By Aug. 23, 2025, tokenized Treasuries were roughly
2.4 billion. Ondo packages BUIDL and WTGXX exposure into OUSG around $700 million. This is how institutions bring yield on-chain, then distribute it through stablecoins or portfolios so retail benefits indirectly.The legal lift is simpler than it looks. You are not “tokenizing a bond” directly. You are tokenizing fund shares that hold Treasuries. A registered transfer agent manages the official shareholder ledger. The agent stops using a private database and writes ownership to a blockchain instead. In practice, the token mirrors fund shares. As long as operations run clean and secure, token ownership maps to the cap table the transfer agent recognizes.
Compliance sets the rules of the road. These are digital securities. They live under securities law. That shapes issuance size, holder counts, and on-chain usage. The frameworks vary. Many U.S. deals use Regulation D Rule 506(c) with Investment Company Act 3(c)(7) to raise from verified accredited investors or qualified purchasers without full registration. Registered 2a-7 money market funds can sell to the public and keep lower minimums. Offshore structures use Cayman Mutual Funds Law or BVI SIBA professional fund rules. Europe runs under UCITS and MMF regs. Singapore follows the Securities and Futures Act 2001. The wrapper sets who can buy, the minimums, and where tokens can move.
How it actually plays, and where it hits limits
This is B2B first. Most Treasury fund tokens are whitelisted. They move only between KYC’d wallets. That walls them off from permissionless DeFi. Holder counts stay low except for registered money market products like WTGXX or BENJI. So the action shifts to institutional DeFi. Omni Network uses Superstate’s USTB for treasury. Ethena posts BUIDL as collateral to mint USDtb, which lets retail feel the yield through a liquid stablecoin.
Cross-chain matters. Many tokens deploy across multiple networks. True bridging is still scarce. Better cross-chain rails will stop liquidity from fragmenting and make portfolio moves smoother.
There are real constraints. No unified RWA rulebook yet. A token in your wallet is not always the same as legal title under current law. You still need the transfer agent and the fund docs to line up with the chain. Without standards, every protocol has to solve the same onboarding, custody, and compliance problems again and again.
Still, the opportunity is tremendous. Treasuries are the beachhead. The route is clear. Compliant wrappers. Whitelisted rails. Institutional balance sheets. Then distribution through stablecoins and structured products that everyday users can actually touch.
If you want the deep dive that inspired this map, read the original research from Four Pillars: What I Learned from Analyzing 12 Tokenized U.S. Treasuries.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.