Every tokenised fund page shows a yield and a chain. Few show the line that decides whether you can hold it: what the token legally is. A fund unit, a debt claim and a receipt are three different instruments, and the label determines who may sell the product, to whom, and under what disclosure.
The label is the licence
The label is not marketing. A fund unit usually sits inside a collective investment regime, which brings a prospectus, a depositary and a restriction on who may be sold to. A debt claim is a security issued by a vehicle under an offering document. A receipt is a claim on an intermediary, and its treatment follows the intermediary.
The same yield can be packaged three ways. The yields converge. The rules do not.
That is why two products quoting the same Treasury rate can have completely different investor bases, and why one can be sold on a public venue while the other cannot.
Three labels, three rulebooks
Fund unit
The holder owns a share of a pooled portfolio. The fund has a manager, a custodian and a document that states the investment policy. Sales are restricted by the regime the fund sits in, which usually means a distributor authorised for that regime and a buyer who meets the criteria.
Debt claim
The holder owns a contractual claim on an issuer or a special purpose vehicle. There is an offering document rather than a prospectus, and the terms set out the maturity, the coupon and the ranking. Transfer restrictions are contractual, and they bind whoever holds the token.
Receipt
The holder owns a claim on an intermediary that holds the asset. The token is a record of that claim, not the asset itself. The risk is the intermediary, and the rules that apply are the ones governing the intermediary’s custody arrangement.
Why KYC sits at the mint
Most tokenised Treasury products require identity verification to mint or redeem, as of October 2026. That is the visible edge of the label. The primary market is gated because the wrapper is a regulated instrument and the issuer has obligations to the buyer.
The secondary market is where the label gets tested. A token that trades freely on a venue may be trading outside the terms of the wrapper, and the issuer’s transfer restrictions tell you which reading applies. If the document says transfers require an eligible holder, a venue listing does not override it.
Read the transfer section before the yield section. It is usually shorter and it decides more.
What 117 funds tell you
Tokenised Treasury products held $14.64B to $14.90B across 117 funds in October 2026 (RWA.xyz). The whole distributed RWA market was $39.01B, up from about $21.5B at the start of the year, a rise of 81%. Private credit was about $8B, commodities above $5B, tokenised equities about $3.3B and real estate about $226M, under 1% of the total.
Concentration matters as much as size. Ethereum carried $16.05B of distributed value, Securitize $4.38B and Ondo $3.96B. Of $34.865B in on-chain AUM counted by DefiLlama, only $4.182B was deployed into DeFi, with Morpho Blue at $735.9M and Aave V3 at $437.6M.
The gap between the two figures is the point. Most of this market is held in wallets and permissioned accounts rather than lent out, which is what a wrapper with transfer restrictions looks like from the outside.
| Label on the token | What the holder owns | Who may sell it, in general terms |
|---|---|---|
| Fund unit | A share of a pooled portfolio | A distributor authorised under the fund’s regime, to buyers who meet its criteria |
| Debt claim | A contractual claim on an issuer or vehicle | The issuer or an arranger acting under the offering document |
| Receipt | A claim on an intermediary holding the asset | The intermediary, under its custody terms |
| Feeder or wrapper share | An interest in another vehicle that holds the underlying | Whoever the wrapper’s rules permit, which can be narrower than the underlying fund |
What to do next
Find the noun. In the offering document, the terms or the risk section, look for share, note, receipt or interest. Then check three things against it: who the issuer is, which regime the document references, and whether transfers are restricted.
If the page cannot tell you, the yield is not the number to compare. Our breakdown of the three products inside the $39B sorts the market by wrapper, and lending rates and utilisation explains what happens when a wrapper is deployed rather than held.
A product that will not name its label has not skipped a detail. It has skipped the question that decides whether it can be sold to you at all.
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