CAYMAN ISLANDS Trends and Developments Contributed by: Jason Ta, Travers Thorp Alberga
decoration; it is the difference between an economic policy and a governance mess. The securities analysis remains delicate. A token whose value is explicitly underwritten by an issuer’s profits looks dangerously like an equity claim. A token whose buyback policy is fully discretionary and unen- forceable may avoid that characterisation, but at a cost in credibility with serious investors. The middle path being drawn in 2026 is structural: revenue accrues to a foundation or DAO-adjacent vehicle whose consti- tutional documents oblige it to deploy that revenue in specified ways, without any contractual claim by token holders against the operating entity. Token hold- ers receive the benefit of the policy without holding a security in the issuer. Where this is well-structured, it gives investors visibility without giving regulators a hook. Where it is poorly structured, it gives them both. Tokens were severed from revenue for regulatory rea- sons. They are being re-attached for commercial ones. The inventory problem: RWAs finally find their market For roughly three years, the entire industry was bang- ing on about tokenisation. Me included. In our 2024 contribution to this guide we set out the case for tokenising real-world assets: fractional ownership of illiquid positions, round-the-clock secondary markets, programmable collateral, real-time settlement, and a generation of investors who would rather tap a button on a phone than negotiate an ISDA Master Agree- ment. None of that was wrong. It was a description of what tokenisation could unlock, not what it had unlocked. The first wave of RWA tokenisation was issuer-led: assets were wrapped and placed on-chain because they could be. Issuance platforms accumulated tokenised products that barely traded. The legal work was often careful. The technology was often impres- sive; the secondary market was often not. The token was there; the demand was not. The current wave is demand-led, but not because retail investors suddenly decided they wanted to self-custo- dy tokenised Treasury exposure. The answer arrived from on-chain asset management. Smart-contract
vaults, curated strategies, tokenised credit platforms, stablecoin yield products and crypto-native treasur- ies all need inventory. A vault is not a passive holder of novelty assets; it is a repeat buyer with strategy constraints, requiring eligible collateral, duration man- agement, yield, liquidity, pricing inputs and redemp- tion mechanics. Once vaults and on-chain allocators became large enough to matter, tokenised Treasuries and short-duration credit stopped being curiosities and started becoming inventory. Products such as BlackRock’s BUIDL, Ondo’s OUSG and USDY, Superstate’s USTB and other tokenised Treasury and short-duration products have helped move the category into a market measured in billions of dollars. The same logic is pulling tokenised private credit, receivables, commodities and real estate into more productive use. Assets that were previously inert are being consumed by strategies that, a few years ago, did not exist at meaningful scale. That changes the economics of RWA issuance. The question is no longer whether an asset can be tokenised. It is whether the resulting token can plug into vault architecture: accepted by smart contracts, valued by oracles, transferred within compliance constraints, redeemed on predictable terms and dili- genced by institutional capital. The supply side has not caught up. A high-quality tokenised RWA is not simply an asset with a token attached. It requires legal title, custody, servicing, val- uation, redemption mechanics and, in many cases, an administrator capable of reconciling the legal register with the token state. The number of issuers doing all of that cleanly remains surprisingly small. That creates the next bottleneck. The demand side wants commoditised, standardised, interoperable inventory; the supply side has historically produced bespoke, one-off issuances. The next phase of RWA growth will therefore be defined less by another tokenised Treasury product than by the plumbing: standardised fund documentation, portable KYC, interoperable whitelisting, reliable valuation oracles and clearer rules for when the legal record and the token record diverge.
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