Real-world-asset tokenisation is often sold as a story about property, art and private credit moving on-chain. The data says something narrower. In the CryptoxInsights RWA Tracker, tokenised treasuries and tokenised funds together account for 10 of the 22 programmes we grade, and they hold the large majority of the sector's value. Private credit accounts for 6, tokenised gold for 3, and real estate, equities and upstream commodities for one each.
Reason one: the yield ban pushed capital somewhere
The GENIUS Act bars payment stablecoin issuers from passing yield to holders. That single provision redirected a large pool of dollar balances that previously sat in interest-bearing stablecoin arrangements. Tokenised treasuries and on-chain money-market funds are the nearest legal substitute: same dollar exposure, same day-to-day liquidity profile, and the yield is legal because the instrument is a fund share rather than a payment token. When the stablecoin market shed roughly $15bn of supply in mid-2026, a meaningful share of it turned up here.
Reason two: the wrapper already existed
Tokenising a money-market fund does not require inventing a legal structure. The fund, the transfer agent, the custodian and the audit already exist; tokenisation replaces the register. Compare that with tokenised real estate, where each asset needs its own SPV, its own valuation cadence and its own enforcement path. That asymmetry is why treasuries scaled first and everything else is still bespoke.
Reason three: institutions can hold it without a policy change
A treasury fund share is an instrument an institutional mandate can already accommodate. A bearer token backed by an offshore issuer usually is not. Our tracker shows the pattern clearly: the treasury and fund programmes are overwhelmingly audited and daily-priced, while the self-reported and limited-disclosure entries cluster in the more exotic asset classes.
Concentration is not a sign of maturity. It is a sign that only one asset class has cleared the compliance bar so far.
Why the concentration is a problem
A market where most value sits in one asset class inherits that asset class's risk. If short-dated rates fall sharply, the entire relative-value case for on-chain treasuries weakens at once, and there is no diversified base underneath to absorb the rotation. Concentration also distorts the sector's transparency statistics: headline audit coverage looks respectable precisely because the audited treasury programmes dominate the value, while the thinner asset classes are where disclosure is weakest.
What would actually broaden the market
Three things: standardised wrappers for non-fund assets, so each deal stops being bespoke; independent verification of physical collateral, whether that is vaulted metal or licensed production such as Burlcore Mining's Ugandan gold operations; and a redemption standard that tells a holder, on-chain, who owes them what. Until those exist, treasuries will keep winning by default.
Our data
Asset-class and disclosure counts in this article are original CryptoxInsights figures drawn from our RWA and Reserve Transparency Tracker, covering 22 tokenised asset programmes and 9 stablecoins graded on primary issuer documentation. Cite freely with attribution.