RWA Tokenization Examples | Real Revenue | CoreFi

The tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) has officially crossed the threshold from experimental concept to institutional reality. On-chain RWA reached $24 billion in 2025 — a 308% increase over three years. McKinsey projects the market will reach $2-4 trillion by 2030. More aggressive estimates from analysts like Skynet Trading put the figure at $16 trillion.

But the most telling signal isn't the projections — it's the names behind the actual deployments. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs — the institutions that define mainstream finance aren't just experimenting with tokenization. They're generating revenue from it.

For asset managers and investment directors still evaluating whether tokenization belongs in their strategic roadmap, the question has shifted. It's no longer "will this work?" but "how quickly can we participate?"

The State of RWA Tokenization in 2026

Before examining specific examples, it's worth understanding the current market composition. The $24 billion in on-chain RWA is distributed across several asset classes:

• Tokenized U.S. Treasuries: The fastest-growing segment, projected to reach $4.2 billion in 2025 alone. Government bonds are the ideal gateway asset — standardized, highly liquid, and well-understood by institutional investors.
• Tokenized money market funds: Led by BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's FOBXX, these represent the institutional entry point into tokenized finance.
• Private credit: Platforms like Maple Finance, Centrifuge, and Tradable have scaled tokenized private lending, connecting institutional capital with borrowers through blockchain-based structures.
• Real estate: Fractional ownership of commercial and residential properties, with automated rent distribution via smart contracts.
• Institutional DeFi: The total value locked (TVL) in institutional-grade DeFi and RWA protocols reached approximately $17 billion in 2025.

The common thread across all of these is that tokenization is being used to solve specific, measurable problems — not to demonstrate technological novelty. Each successful deployment addresses a concrete business need: faster settlement, fractional access, reduced operational costs, or improved liquidity.

BlackRock BUIDL: The Institutional Seal of Approval

When BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager with over $10 trillion in AUM, launched its BUIDL (BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) in March 2024, the tokenization market gained something it had long lacked: unimpeachable institutional credibility.

BUIDL is a tokenized money market fund that invests in U.S. Treasury bills, repurchase agreements, and cash. Each token represents one share of the fund, priced at $1. The fund operates on the Ethereum blockchain, providing investors with:

• Daily accrued dividends paid automatically to token holders' wallets
• Instant transferability between whitelisted institutional investors, without the traditional T+1 or T+2 settlement delay
• 24/7 liquidity — positions can be transferred outside traditional market hours
• On-chain transparency — fund composition and NAV are verifiable in real time

BUIDL crossed $1 billion in AUM within months of launch, making it the largest tokenized fund in traditional finance. The speed of adoption demonstrated that institutional demand for tokenized products was not hypothetical — it was latent, waiting for a trusted name to make the first move.

The significance extends beyond the fund itself. By tokenizing a money market fund — the most conservative, widely-held institutional product — BlackRock demonstrated that tokenization's benefits (instant settlement, 24/7 transferability, automated distributions) apply to mainstream financial products, not just exotic crypto-native instruments.

Franklin Templeton: On-Chain Since 2021

Franklin Templeton has been even more aggressive in its tokenization strategy, having launched the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) as early as 2021. FOBXX records share ownership and transactions on the Stellar and Polygon blockchains, making it one of the first SEC-registered funds to use a public blockchain as its official book of record.

The fund demonstrates a critical architectural choice: using blockchain not just as a distribution layer, but as the system of record for share ownership. This eliminates the need for a separate transfer agent to maintain shareholder records, reducing operational costs and complexity.

Franklin Templeton has since expanded its tokenization efforts, exploring tokenized alternatives across multiple asset classes and blockchain networks. Their approach validates a key thesis: established asset managers can adopt blockchain infrastructure incrementally, starting with a single product and expanding as the technology and regulatory frameworks mature.

JPMorgan Onyx: Institutional Infrastructure at Scale

JPMorgan's approach to tokenization has been different from BlackRock's and Franklin Templeton's — rather than tokenizing specific funds, JPMorgan built Onyx, an institutional-grade blockchain platform for tokenized assets and payments.

Onyx powers several notable capabilities:

• JPM Coin: A permissioned stablecoin used for wholesale payments between JPMorgan's institutional clients, settling billions of dollars in intraday repo transactions
• Tokenized collateral: Enabling institutions to pledge tokenized assets as collateral in real time, improving capital efficiency
• Programmable payments: Smart contract-based payment logic for complex institutional transactions

JPMorgan's investment in Onyx demonstrates that tokenization's value proposition extends far beyond retail-oriented fund products. For institutional clients, the primary benefits are capital efficiency (through instant collateral movement), settlement speed (through atomic delivery-vs-payment), and operational simplification (through programmable transaction logic).

Treasury Tokenization: The Gateway Asset Class

U.S. Treasury tokenization has emerged as the entry point for institutional adoption, and for good reason. Treasuries are:

• Standardized: Uniform instruments that don't require complex structuring to tokenize
• Highly rated: Risk-free (or near risk-free) from a credit perspective, eliminating credit analysis complexity
• Widely understood: Every institutional investor holds Treasuries, removing the need for product education
• Liquid: The underlying market is the most liquid in the world, ensuring reliable pricing and redemption

Projected U.S. Treasury tokenization volume of $4.2 billion in 2025 represents a significant milestone, but it's still a tiny fraction of the $26+ trillion Treasury market. The growth trajectory suggests this percentage will increase substantially as more institutions adopt tokenized Treasury products for yield management, collateral optimization, and cash management.

The European Investment Bank has also contributed to the trend, successfully issuing a €100 million digital bond on blockchain, demonstrating that sovereign and supranational debt issuers see value in the tokenized format.

Private Credit and Real Estate: Emerging Revenue Opportunities

Beyond Treasuries and money market funds, tokenization is creating new revenue models in previously illiquid asset classes.

Private credit is a particularly compelling use case. The traditional private lending market is characterized by long settlement times, limited secondary liquidity, and high minimum investments. Tokenization addresses all three:

• Maple Finance has facilitated billions in institutional loans through tokenized structures, connecting institutional lenders with corporate borrowers on-chain
• Centrifuge tokenizes real-world credit assets (invoices, trade receivables, real estate loans), enabling them to be used as collateral in DeFi protocols — a bridge between traditional credit markets and on-chain capital
• Tradable has scaled tokenized private credit products for institutional investors, demonstrating that traditional credit analysis and on-chain distribution can coexist

Real estate tokenization has matured significantly, with platforms enabling fractional ownership of commercial properties, automated rental distributions via smart contracts, and secondary market trading of tokenized property shares. A $50 million commercial building can be divided into tokens representing fractional ownership, each with automated pro-rata rent distributions — eliminating the operational overhead of traditional syndication structures.

Revenue Models: How Institutions Are Monetizing

The transition from hype to revenue is evident in the business models emerging around tokenization:

Management fees on tokenized funds: Like traditional funds, but with lower operational costs. BlackRock's BUIDL charges management fees while benefiting from reduced transfer agency, custody, and settlement costs.

Issuance fees: Platforms that enable other institutions to tokenize assets charge issuance and structuring fees, similar to traditional investment banking but at lower cost points.

Secondary market facilitation: Providing liquidity and trading infrastructure for tokenized assets generates transaction fees and spread revenue.

Collateral management: Tokenized collateral services generate fees from institutions seeking improved capital efficiency through real-time collateral movement.

White-label infrastructure: Providing tokenization-as-a-service for institutions that want to issue tokenized products under their own brand, generating platform licensing and per-transaction fees.

For asset managers evaluating the opportunity, the revenue potential comes from two sources: cost reduction (lower operational expenses for existing products) and market expansion (accessing new investor segments through fractional ownership and improved liquidity).

Infrastructure Requirements for Tokenization at Scale

The gap between a tokenization proof of concept and a revenue-generating tokenization business lies in infrastructure. Specifically, institutions need:

Lifecycle management: Tokenized assets aren't static — they require ongoing management including distributions (dividends, interest, rent), corporate actions, redemptions, and maturity processing. Smart contracts can automate much of this, but the logic must integrate with traditional fund administration and accounting systems.

Regulatory compliance: Tokenized securities remain securities, subject to prospectus requirements, investor qualification rules, and ongoing reporting obligations. Under MiCA, tokenized assets that qualify as crypto-assets have additional compliance requirements including whitepapers and CASP authorization.

Multi-chain support: Different asset classes and use cases may favor different blockchain networks. Ethereum for institutional products, Polygon or Stellar for payments-oriented tokens, private chains for confidential institutional transactions. Infrastructure must support multiple chains without operational fragmentation.

Custody integration: Tokenized assets require institutional-grade custody with appropriate key management, insurance, and access controls. This is typically addressed through partnerships with providers like Fireblocks, Taurus, or BitGo.

Core banking integration: Perhaps most critically, tokenization infrastructure must connect seamlessly with the issuer's core banking systems — ledger, compliance, payments, and customer management. Without this integration, tokenized products exist in a silo, unable to benefit from or contribute to the institution's broader operations.

The CoreFi Tokenization Advantage

CoreFi's existing asset tokenization capabilities position us at the intersection of traditional finance infrastructure and blockchain-based asset management. Our platform provides:

• Native tokenization integrated directly with our core banking ledger — not a bolt-on integration, but a unified system where tokenized assets and fiat positions coexist
• Lifecycle management for tokenized assets including issuance, distributions, corporate actions, and redemption
• Regulatory compliance designed for EU-regulated institutions, with MiCA and DORA considerations built into the architecture
• Modular design that allows institutions to start with a single asset class and expand as their tokenization strategy matures

The $24 billion in on-chain RWA today is just the beginning. The institutions that build tokenization capabilities now — with infrastructure that scales from pilot to production — will capture a disproportionate share of what McKinsey projects will be a multi-trillion-dollar market by decade's end.

The hype phase is over. The revenue phase has begun. The only question is whether your infrastructure is ready to participate.

Ready to explore asset tokenization for your institution?

CoreFi provides native tokenization capabilities integrated with core banking infrastructure — designed for real-world asset issuance, management, and compliance. Get in touch to discuss your tokenization strategy.