Who controls tokenized RWAs?

A tokenized real-world asset (RWA) puts a traditional financial product on a public blockchain. By bringing assets such as stocks or Treasury bills onchain, the goal is to improve transaction efficiency and market access to such products. Tokenized RWAs are now issued by dozens of firms, each pitching an independent product but pull on the threads and the same small set of institutions sit behind most of it.

BlackRock issues BUIDL, the largest tokenized Treasury fund, using Securitize, which also provides the transfer-agent infrastructure for competing products such as VanEck's VBILL and Apollo's ACRED. In addition to BUIDL and ACRED, BNY Mellon also custodies the Circle Reserve Fund behind USDC, which BlackRock manages. Robinhood's tokenized stocks are custodied by Alpaca Securities, which also custodies Dinari, a tokenized-equity competitor. The same venture firms that fund DeFi's own risk curators also fund several RWA issuers. 3 unidentified wallets control 69% of Maple Finance's votes. Untangle the rest of the web below.