The clearest way to understand real-world assets is to look at what people have actually tokenized. The live examples cluster into a few asset classes - money-market funds, US Treasuries, gold, real estate, and private credit - each with a real underlying asset and a token that tracks it. The projects below are illustrative, named for teaching, and the figures are approximate as of 2026; none of this is a recommendation.

The main categories of real-world assets

Most of the market sits in a handful of buckets. A real-world asset can be almost anything of value held off-chain, but these are where real volume and real products exist today.

The list that follows picks one well-known case per category so you can see the pattern: a real asset, a legal structure that holds it, and a token that represents a share.

Money-market funds

BlackRock BUIDL

BlackRock's USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, known as BUIDL, is a tokenized fund issued on Ethereum with Securitize as transfer agent. Each token represents a share of a fund that holds cash, US Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements, and it pays yield to holders on-chain. It launched in 2024 and grew into one of the largest tokenized funds, open to qualified institutional investors rather than the general public.

Franklin Templeton

Franklin Templeton's on-chain US Government Money Fund (ticker FOBXX, tracked on-chain via its BENJI platform) was an early mover - a registered money-market fund whose share ownership is recorded on a public blockchain. It shows that a mainstream, regulated fund can run its share register on-chain rather than only in a traditional system.

Tokenized Treasuries

Ondo

Ondo Finance issues products such as OUSG, a tokenized Treasury product that gives holders exposure to short-term US government securities, and USDY, a yield-bearing token backed by Treasuries and bank deposits. The appeal is simple: earn close to the Treasury yield while holding a token you can move on-chain. Returns track the underlying rates, so they rise and fall with them - nothing here is fixed or guaranteed.

Commodities

Paxos Gold (PAXG)

Paxos Gold is a tokenized commodity: each PAXG token represents one fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery gold bar held in professional vaults. Because the gold is allocated to specific bars, holders can verify the backing, and the token price tracks the spot gold price. It is one of the cleanest examples of a token mapping one-to-one to a physical asset.

Real estate

RealT

RealT tokenizes individual US rental properties - mostly single-family and small multifamily homes - and distributes the net rent to token holders, historically paid out in a stablecoin. Each property sits in its own legal entity, and the tokens represent shares of that entity. It is a concrete example of tokenized real estate aimed at smaller investors rather than institutions.

Private credit

Centrifuge

Centrifuge is a protocol for tokenized private credit - loans to real businesses, backed by assets like invoices or real estate, packaged into on-chain pools that investors fund. It brought a whole category of off-chain lending on-chain and has been used as the credit engine behind other RWA products. Private credit carries real default risk, which is the trade-off for its higher yields.

What the examples have in common

Across funds, Treasuries, gold, property, and credit, the structure rhymes. There is a real asset, a legal wrapper that owns it, a custodian or administrator, and a token issued against shares of that wrapper. Tokenization is the plumbing; the asset is the product.

The differences that matter are who can buy (many of these are limited to eligible or institutional investors), how the token is backed, and how easily you can sell. Use these cases as a template: when you meet a new RWA, map it onto the same four parts and ask what happens if the issuer disappears.

Where to go next

• Next: why tokenize real-world assets - the benefits and the trade-offs.
• Start here: what RWA tokenization is.
• Ready to act? See the investor's view.

Sources: rwa.xyz; issuer disclosures (BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Ondo, Paxos, RealT, Centrifuge); U.S. SEC (sec.gov), as of 2026.