Tokenized Treasuries & RWA: the “Boring” Product that Quietly Won 2025

Butros Oveto

In a year when crypto proved it can still drop hard and fast, the most durable success story wasn’t a new meme, a flashy chain, or the latest AI-token pitch. It was a product that would sound almost insulting at a crypto conference: U.S. Treasury exposure, packaged as tokens, moving on public blockchains.

The Financial Times described the shift plainly: crypto investors piled into tokenised Treasury and money-market funds for yield, for speed, and increasingly for collateral utility. Assets in those tokenised funds surged 80% in 2025 to $7.4 billion, the FT reported, and the growth wasn’t coming from a single corner of the market — it was being pulled by traders, crypto firms, and institutions looking for something stable that still pays.

By late December, that “boring” category had gotten bigger. RWA.xyz — a major tracker for tokenized real-world assets — showed tokenized U.S. Treasuries at about $9.02 billion in total value. The number matters, but the trajectory matters more: tokenized treasuries evolved from an interesting pilot into a measurable market with recognizable leaders, product differentiation, and a clear use case that survives drawdowns.

To understand why this quietly won 2025, you have to start with the thing stablecoins don’t naturally give you. Stablecoins are excellent for settlement, but they don’t automatically pass the risk-free rate through to holders. Tokenized T-bills do. In a world where the Fed’s benchmark rate ended the year in a 3.50-3.75% range, “cash that earns” stops being a niche preference and becomes a treasury strategy.

The other reason is psychological — and it’s inseparable from the quarter that “broke.” After an autumn defined by leverage liquidations and risk-off crosswinds, collateral quality became part of the conversation again. In that context, tokenized treasuries offered a simple promise: you can park value in an instrument people already understand, collect a yield, and still keep the asset programmable — movable 24/7, potentially usable as collateral, and integrable into crypto’s workflows.

By March, the category’s progress was already visible in milestones. CoinDesk reported that tokenized U.S. Treasuries surpassed $5 billion in market value for the first time, citing RWA.xyz data, and framed the growth around demand for blockchain-based, real-world collateral. Around the same period, CoinGecko’s 2025 RWA report noted that tokenized treasuries saw a major leap between March and April, with market cap rising by $2.3 billion (+67.1%) as the global outlook worsened and U.S. trade tariffs became a stress factor.

That detail is more than trivia. It shows tokenized treasuries aren’t just a “risk-on” novelty. They can be a flight-to-quality move inside crypto itself — capital shifting from volatile assets into a yield-bearing instrument when macro risk rises.

The same CoinGecko report captured how quickly a leaderboard emerged. By April 2025, BlackRock and Securitize’s BUIDL had established itself as the largest tokenized treasury product, with about a 44% market share, while Ondo and Franklin Templeton followed behind, alongside newer entrants such as Superstate and Hashnote. In one sense, that concentration is exactly what you’d expect from finance: trust and distribution are moats. In another sense, it’s a very crypto-native dynamic: the first products to become “default collateral” tend to snowball, because once something is integrated everywhere, people stop questioning it.

Distribution, more than ideology, decided who won early. Asset managers and fund platforms brought credibility and compliance packaging. Crypto-native firms brought integration into exchanges, prime services, and on-chain venues. And banks, quietly, sniffed out the plumbing opportunity: tokenized collateral systems, faster margining, and settlement efficiencies. The FT pointed to tokenised funds being used as collateral in crypto derivatives and noted that firms such as JPMorgan and specialized infrastructure players were exploring tokenised collateral systems that could streamline margin and payment processes.

This is the part many headlines miss: tokenized treasuries aren’t trying to replace stablecoins; they’re trying to replace idle balances. A trader who wants to stay “in dollars” between positions doesn’t actually want dollars — they want dollars plus yield, without losing the ability to post collateral quickly. A protocol treasurer holding reserves doesn’t want volatility — they want a conservative asset that doesn’t just sit there. A market-maker managing margin doesn’t want friction — they want collateral that moves in real time. Tokenized treasuries step into all three of those roles.

Of course, 2025 also clarified the constraint: “tokenized” does not automatically mean “liquid.” Much of this market still lives behind transfer restrictions and whitelists, and secondary liquidity can be thin even when the headline market cap is large. That’s not a flaw so much as a feature of moving regulated instruments onto public rails. It takes time for trading venues, compliance standards, and collateral frameworks to mature.

Still, the category’s momentum suggests the direction of travel. If you were mapping the market visually, you’d want to show three things. First, the growth curve from the $5 billion milestone in March to roughly $9 billion by late December, it demonstrates adoption rather than hype. Second, a market-share snapshot around April 2025 showing BUIDL’s lead and the chasing pack, because it reveals how quickly distribution concentrated. Third, a “why yield wins” comparison — tokenized treasury yields versus the prevailing rate environment — to explain why this product worked even when speculative appetite cooled.

If Q4 was a reminder that crypto can still behave like a levered risk asset, tokenized treasuries were the counter-lesson: crypto can also build boring, useful financial products that people keep using when the market stops feeling fun. The real story of 2025 may be that the most meaningful adoption wasn’t the loudest. It was capital choosing a simple trade — credible yield plus programmable settlement — and turning it into infrastructure.

Source