Who's who in RWA, layer by layer

How to read the map

Think of a tokenized product as a relay team. Each runner is a different firm with a different licence, and the product is only as strong as its weakest handover. When a press release says "BlackRock tokenized a fund", it names one runner. Behind it sit a platform, a custodian, a transfer agent, an auditor and usually an oracle.

The map below groups the firms that matter in September 2026 into nine layers. It is a selection. RWA.xyz, the most used public dashboard for this market, counted 98 asset managers on 28 August 2026 and 207 tokenization platforms on 3 September 2026.

Two words from chapter 1 keep coming back in the tables. Distributed assets can leave the issuer's platform and move between investors' wallets, like BlackRock's BUIDL. Represented assets use a blockchain only as a record that investors cannot move themselves, like Figure's home-equity loans on the Provenance chain. A company's scale figure means very different things depending on which of the two it counts.

Asset managers: the giants distribute, the independents compete on fees

An asset manager decides what the fund buys and takes the management fee. In tokenization the manager is usually the famous name on the product, and usually the firm that needs tokenization least.

The table hides the most important split. For BlackRock or Apollo, a tokenized fund is a new sales channel for a business they already run. ACRED is roughly 0.014% of Apollo's assets, a rounding error for the manager.

The fee side tells the same story. BUIDL's main share class charges 50 basis points (a basis point, bp, is one hundredth of a percent), which comes to roughly 13 to 14 mn USD a year on infrastructure BlackRock pays for anyway.

Ondo and Superstate exist only in this market, so they must live on the fee alone. Tokenized Treasury funds charge between 15 and 50 bps. The stack chapter shows that a stand-alone issuer at 15 bps needs about 290 mn USD of assets just to cover a fixed annual cost estimated at about 435,000 USD. That is why the independents build second products, such as Ondo's stocks and Superstate's USCC, and why a fee waiver often ends quietly.

Platforms, transfer agents and custodians: the firms that hold the register

The platform turns a fund share into a token. The transfer agent is the licensed firm that keeps the official list of who owns each share, the way a company's shareholder register works. The custodian holds the underlying Treasury bills or bars. These are the least famous layers and the ones that decide who owns what in a dispute.

The platform layer carries most of the attention and so far none of the profit. Securitize, the only pure tokenizer that files public accounts, lost 21.7 mn USD in the second quarter of 2026 on 14.4 mn USD of revenue, while its transaction volume rose 147% (Form 8-K, 12 August 2026). Its fees depend on the number of funds it serves and on setup projects, not on trading. More activity costs it more and pays it nothing.

The legal point matters more than the income statement. For BUIDL, an analysis of the offering memorandum by Steakhouse Financial (April 2024) found that the transfer agent's register governs ownership, and that the register wins when it disagrees with the chain. BlackRock's newer registered funds are built differently. Its filing of 8 May 2026 for OnChain Shares of a Treasury money-market fund names BNY Mellon as transfer agent and says the Ethereum record, together with an off-chain file that maps wallets to people, conclusively governs ownership unless one of those systems fails. A sister fund filed the same day uses Securitize as transfer agent. So the legal owner of a token is whoever the register defined in that fund's documents says it is, and the definition differs from fund to fund. Who holds the keys explains both designs.

Oracles and venues: prices in, liquidity out

An oracle writes an off-chain number, such as a fund's daily net asset value, into a smart contract so other contracts can use it. A venue is where the token trades or serves as collateral for a loan. Getting prices on-chain explains how oracles work. Here the question is who does what.

The numbers in this pair of layers are small. Aave Horizon's borrowing was well under 1% of the distributed market. A token whose main use is sitting in a wallet has little need for either layer, which is why RWAs in DeFi finds so little use in lending.

Credit, commodities, stocks and networks

These four layers are asset classes more than services, and each has one or two dominant names.

Two pairs show why the same category number can hide different products. PAXG and XAUT look alike in statistics, yet one is supervised by New York State and the other by El Salvador's digital-asset regulator. Canton's 328 bn USD is the biggest number in the market, and it sits almost entirely in Broadridge's repo platform, which no outside investor can buy into.

Tokenized stocks and Robinhood Chain covers the stock-token race in depth.

How the layers compete, and who disappeared

The layers are merging. Securitize holds four licences in one group. Apex Group, a fund administrator, bought a majority of Tokeny. RedStone bought the ratings firm Credora and the data site Security Token Market. Custodians are acquiring bank charters. Each firm tries to own more of the relay, because a single layer on its own earns thin fees.

The profit today sits at the two ends of the chain. The manager keeps most of the fee, and a lender such as Figure earns from the loans themselves; Figure's accounts show no tokenization revenue at all. The middle layers are paid per fund or per feed and have not yet found a fee that grows with use.

The exits follow a pattern, and none of them was a smart-contract hack.

• Mountain Protocol (USDM): Anchorage bought it on 12 May 2025 and wound the Treasury-backed dollar down by 22 August 2025. The bills were fine. The product ended because its owner chose to end it.
• Goldfinch: unsecured loans to fintech lenders in emerging markets. Governance voted to wind down in June 2026 with 56 mn USD of principal unpaid.
• RealT: tokenized Detroit rental homes. It raised about 140 mn USD and announced liquidation on 2 July 2026 after the city sued 165 of its LLCs, leaving about 640,000 USD of escrow for up to 22,000 investors.
• MANTRA: a chain marketed as the regulated home of RWA lost over 5.5 bn USD of market value in hours on 13 April 2025, when its OM token, more than half of it held by ten wallets, collapsed.

What to watch next

• Securitize's quarterly results: the first public test of whether a tokenization platform can earn a fee that rises with activity.
• The DTC tokenization service: DTC, the central US securities depository, planned a commercial start for October 2026. If it runs at scale, it competes directly with private platforms for the register.
• More vertical deals: platforms buying broker-dealers and administrators buying token software. Each deal removes a handover between firms.
• Custody charters: firms converting to national trust banks. A federal charter lets a custodian serve funds that state-licensed rivals cannot.
• Centrifuge's concentration: whether its two largest pools stay or leave, since they are almost all of its value.