If your idle on‐chain dollars feel expensive, pay attention: tokenized U.S. Treasuries have crossed USD 10 billion in AUM as of late Nov–early Dec 2025, up from under $1 billion in early 2023 and multi‐billion by late 2024. This piece explains what happened and what to do next for traders, fintech builders, and risk teams. Key drivers: 4–5% short‐dated yields, Treasuries’ risk‐free status, and programmable token formats plus institutional launches from BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Ondo and Maker. Impact: they’re becoming base collateral in DeFi, creating new arbitrage and NAV‐price trades, and offering dollar‐linked, yield‐bearing rails for payments. Watch custody/legal structures, smart‐contract risk, and liquidity/redemption mechanics. Immediate actions: integrate T‐Bill tokens into collateral and treasury strategies, build RWA‐aware analytics and risk models, and stress‐test on‐chain/off‐chain behavior.

Global watchdog scrutiny and new institutional products are pushing tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) from experimentation toward regulated finance: on 2025-11-11 IOSCO warned of investor confusion over ownership and issuer counterparty risk even as tokenized RWAs grew to US$24 billion by mid‐2025 (private credit ~US$14B), with Ethereum hosting about US$7.5B across 335 products (~60% market share). Product innovation includes Figure’s US‐approved yield-bearing stablecoin security YLDS and a HELOC lending pool, and the NUVA marketplace (Provenance claimed ~$15.7B in related assets). These developments matter for customers, revenue and operations because low secondary liquidity, legal ambiguity (security vs token), and dependency on traditional custodians create compliance and market‐risk tradeoffs. Near term, executives should monitor regulatory rule‐making (IOSCO, SEC, FSA, MAS), broader investor‐eligible launches, liquidity metrics, interoperability standards, and disclosure/audit transparency.