Tokenisation Is Already
in Production

A tokenised treasury is a digital token, issued on a distributed ledger, that represents ownership of US government debt, most commonly short-dated Treasury bills or a fund that holds them. The token is the on-chain claim; the bills sit off-chain with a custodian. Holding and transferring the token is, in substance, holding a share of the underlying instrument.

Two distinctions keep the term clean. A tokenised treasury is not a stablecoin: a stablecoin holds a fixed price and typically passes no yield to the holder, whereas a tokenised treasury is a yield-bearing claim on the bills it represents. It is also unrelated to the "tokenisation" used to mask a card number at checkout, a data-security technique that shares the word and nothing else.

Tokenised treasuries vs tokenised money market funds

Most of the live market is not raw tokenised bills but tokenised money market funds. BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's BENJI are, structurally, money market funds whose units are issued as tokens: the fund holds the treasuries and cash, and the token represents a share in it. For an allocator the wrapper matters, as the dedicated section below sets out.

Tokenised treasuries are best read as a sequence, and an allocator assessing any product should be able to trace each step.

• Asset and structure. An issuer holds US treasuries, or units in a fund that holds them, and defines the legal claim the token will represent.
• Custody. The underlying bills are placed with a qualified custodian and ring-fenced, so the asset cannot be moved or pledged twice. This is the off-chain anchor for the on-chain claim.
• Minting. A smart contract issues the tokens, in many cases as an ERC-20 token on a public ledger, encoding the rules for ownership, transfer and any income or redemption rights.
• On-chain settlement. Tokens are distributed to eligible investors and settle on-chain, often close to instantly and around the clock, rather than across the multi-day cycles of conventional market plumbing.

The institutional appeal sits in three properties:

• 24/7 settlement. Transfers can clear continuously, including outside conventional market hours.
• Programmability. Income distribution, redemptions and compliance checks can execute automatically in the smart contract.
• Collateral mobility and fractional ownership. A tokenised holding can be moved or posted as collateral quickly, and divided into smaller units, widening who can hold it.

This is an institutional settlement instrument, not a yield-farming position. Read it for what the plumbing does, and the speculative framing falls away.

Strip away the noise around the category and the size is still measured against a maturing market. As of June 2026, tokenised treasuries totalled roughly ~$13 billion to $15 billion on-chain, concentrated in a handful of issuers and growing through the year (RWA.xyz, June 2026). It is a point-in-time number that should be re-verified, refreshed and dated whenever it is quoted, including on publication day.

The issuers are recognisable institutions, not crypto start-ups. BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's BENJI lead the named market; Ondo and OpenEden run sizeable products alongside them. Easy to overlook, and a mistake to, is JPMorgan's Kinexys, the bank's blockchain settlement and tokenisation platform, which sits at the centre of cross-border settlement work involving Mastercard, Ondo and Ripple. For an allocator reading who is in production, Kinexys belongs in the first rank.

Issuer comparison

The Group sets out a fuller builder assessment in its analysis of who is actually building on tokenisation.

The clearest way to read most of the live market is as tokenised money market funds. BUIDL and BENJI are not bespoke crypto instruments; they are money market funds, holding short-dated treasuries and cash, whose units are issued and settled as tokens. The fund structure, the custody and the regulated wrapper are conventional. The ledger is the new part.

What the wrapper changes for an institutional holder is operational, not exotic. Settlement moves from a multi-day cycle to near-instant, including outside market hours, and a tokenised unit can move peer-to-peer or be posted as collateral without the fund administrator standing in the middle of every step. The economic exposure is the same one a treasury function already understands: short-dated US government debt held in a money market fund. The tokenisation changes how the unit is held and moved, not what it is, which is why a tokenised money market fund reads as an operational upgrade rather than a new asset class.

Every ranking page frames tokenised treasuries as a DeFi yield or collateral instrument. The allocator's question is different. For a family office or treasury function, a tokenised treasury is an idle-cash and operational-settlement tool: a way to hold short-dated government debt that earns yield, settles around the clock, and can be moved or redeemed without waiting for a conventional cycle to clear.

The honest framing is a "1996 internet moment": the direction is legible and the infrastructure is live, yet many treasury functions have read the memo and done nothing. That inertia is rational, since the operational case has to clear a real bar before idle cash moves, but it is not free. The cost of waiting is settlement friction and foregone optionality while the rails mature.

Access is answered at institutional altitude, not as a retail "how to buy" exercise. Eligible institutions typically subscribe through the issuer or a regulated distribution partner under the fund's terms, with onboarding and custody that resemble any other money market fund, plus a wallet and on-chain settlement layer. The same plumbing carries private credit rather than treasuries, a natural extension of the same operational thesis.

Risk is the part most treatments of this instrument leave out, and the part an allocator can least afford to. The risks fall into four groups.

• Issuer and custody structure. The token is only as sound as the custody behind it. What matters is whether the bills genuinely exist, are correctly titled, and are not pledged twice, which concentrates the real-world risk in the custodian and the fund structure rather than the chain.
• Smart-contract and key risk. On-chain, contract bugs, key management and protocol security are live concerns; a flawless legal structure on faulty code is still exposed.
• Regulatory fragmentation. There is no single global regime. A token may be a security in one jurisdiction and something else in another, and custody, disclosure and secondary-trading rules differ market by market.
• Secondary-market liquidity. Redemption at the fund is one thing; a deep secondary market is another, and for several products that market is still thin, so continuous tradability should not be assumed.

Beneath all four sits the question that decides the rest: does the on-chain token match the off-chain asset, and does it stay matched over time? That authentication problem is the field's central unsolved issue, examined separately in the Group's work on the truth layer that authenticates tokenised assets. The US Treasury's own Borrowing Advisory Committee has analysed digital assets and the Treasury market in measured terms (US Treasury / TBAC, 2024), the register an allocator should match: constructive, but unsentimental about the open problems.

The direction is clear; the magnitude is contested. Forecasts for tokenised assets by 2030 span roughly $2 trillion at the cautious end to about $16 trillion at the expansive end, both projections that depend on adoption, regulation and how "tokenised assets" are defined (McKinsey, 2024; Boston Consulting Group & ADDX, 2022). Tokenised treasuries are one of the few categories already in production, which makes them a credible leading indicator of that range rather than a guarantee of its upper bound. The sober posture is to carry the range, refresh the live figure, and let production, not the hype number, do the talking.

This article is provided by IMS Group for information purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, an offer, or a solicitation. Figures are point-in-time and projections are estimates.