The tokenised Treasury market has grown 37-fold since early 2023, with Circle's USYC fund now leading BlackRock's BUIDL by $250 million as institutional demand outpaces stablecoin growth in absolute terms for the first time.
Tokenised US Treasuries reached $13.53 billion last week, posting a 0.63 per cent gain in seven days and cementing their position as the largest segment of a real-world asset market now worth $29.22 billion. The milestone would have been unthinkable in early 2023, when the entire category stood at $380 million. A 37-fold expansion in three years is not normal growth; it is the kind of adoption curve that rewrites the assumptions of everyone involved — issuers, regulators, and the traditional bond desks that are quietly losing market share to smart contracts.
Circle's USYC fund, acquired through the Hashnote purchase in early 2025, leads the market at $2.67 billion. BlackRock's BUIDL, managed through Securitize and available to US Qualified Purchasers with a $5 million minimum, sits at $2.42 billion. The gap has widened steadily since January; BUIDL's market share has fallen from a peak of 46 per cent last May to roughly 18 per cent today. That decline doesn't reflect a failure of BlackRock's product — BUIDL remains the most recognised name in the category — but rather the speed at which competitors have entered a market that Larry Fink's own endorsement helped legitimise.
Fink's framing, delivered at a conference earlier this year, was characteristically grand: 'We believe that tokenisation today may be roughly where the internet was in 1996.' The comparison is overused in financial services, but the numbers back it up more than most analogies of this kind. The tokenised Treasury market added $2.12 billion in the first two months of 2026 alone, outpacing stablecoin supply growth in absolute dollar terms for the first time. When a yield-bearing instrument grows faster than the non-yielding dollar equivalent on the same rails, something structural has shifted.
Six asset categories within the broader RWA market have independently crossed $1 billion: private credit, gold and commodities, US Treasuries, corporate bonds, non-US government bonds, and institutional alternative funds. Bernstein's prediction of a tokenisation 'supercycle' in January looks less like sell-side optimism and more like a conservative reading of where the market was already heading. McKinsey projects $2 trillion by 2030; Standard Chartered's forecast of $30 trillion by 2034 sounds aggressive until you plot the current growth rate on a logarithmic chart.
The competitive dynamics are reshaping both crypto-native and traditional finance. Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund, Amundi's partnership with Spiko on the SAFO fund, and JPMorgan's Kinexys division — the rebranded blockchain unit that helped the bank generate part of its record $11.6 billion in Q1 trading revenue — are all fighting for allocations in a market that rewards early movers with sticky institutional capital.
BUIDL's expansion to nine blockchains, including Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Aptos, reflects BlackRock's belief that multi-chain distribution is the correct strategy for institutional products. Circle has taken a different approach, concentrating USYC's distribution through its existing USDC rails and leveraging the network effects of a stablecoin that already dominates DeFi's settlement layer. Both strategies have merit; neither has proven definitively superior.
The regulatory tailwind is real but unevenly distributed. The SEC's March 2026 joint interpretation with the CFTC classified tokenised securities under existing frameworks, which provided clarity for US issuers but also imposed compliance costs that favour large asset managers over smaller fintech entrants. In Europe, MiCA's full implementation has created a parallel regulatory channel, one that several funds — including USYC, domiciled in Bermuda for non-US investors — are deliberately structured to exploit.
What hasn't changed is the fundamental value proposition. A tokenised Treasury yields 4 to 6 per cent annually, settles in minutes rather than days, and can be used as collateral in DeFi protocols — a combination that traditional money market funds simply cannot match on speed or composability. The $13.53 billion figure is large by crypto standards; by the standards of the $26 trillion US Treasury market, it rounds to zero. The question is no longer whether tokenisation works. It's how long the traditional market can afford to pretend the gap doesn't matter.
