The Real-World
Asset Stack, layer by layer
Next month the DTCC moves tokenization from pilot to full commercial service, and tokenized recordkeeping becomes a standard option for DTC participants. Everyone has the thesis now. Almost nobody can tell you what the stack underneath it actually consists of. This is the full lifecycle of a real asset going on-chain, from the loan getting written to an institution posting it as margin. Fifteen layers. Each one is a company, or several. Beside each, the public milestone proving that layer is going live, and the company we own there. The surprise at the end of the map is how little is actually missing. Every piece now exists in production somewhere, which makes the rest a matter of time.
Create the asset
Before anything can be tokenized, something real has to exist.Origination
The asset gets made. The loan written, the lease signed, the building financed, the catalog recorded. Nothing downstream exists without this.
Tether and Fasanara launch a $400M fund for stablecoin-enabled private credit, funding origination directly against digital-dollar liquidity.
9 SEP 2026Lit Financial is one of America's fastest-growing mortgage originators, over $1B in originations projected this year, with tokenized treasury infrastructure layered on top of a real lending business. TrustFunds originates a different shape entirely, pooling asset-backed capital to co-invest in the down payment alongside a new homebuyer.
DGB Studio + FundValuation
What is it worth, and who is allowed to say so. Every tokenized asset and every collateral position rests on a number somebody trusts.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac begin verifying platforms against UAD 3.6, the first rebuild of the US appraisal data standard in a generation.
2026The first appraisal platform verified by both GSEs. AI valuation for appraisal management companies, saving hours per report. Effectively the price oracle for the largest asset class on earth.
DGB Studio + FundThe built world
The physical operations under real estate. Materials, hauling, waste, and the paper trail that has to become a data trail before any of it is financeable.
No institutional standard yet. Most of this industry still runs on paper manifests and a clipboard.
NO MILESTONELiveGistics brings real-time digital eTicketing to construction materials and waste, replacing paper manifests. Detroit-based, founder won Black Ambition's grand prize. Juno works the other end, helping developers adopt industrialized, prefabricated building systems for multifamily.
DGB Fund · DGB StudioPut it on-chain
The regulated middle. Least glamorous, hardest to displace.Issuance
Minting the token that represents the asset, inside a legal wrapper that survives contact with a regulator.
DTCC converts assets held at The Depository Trust Company into tokens used in real production trades, then moves to full commercial service in October. Pilot to operational readiness in one quarter.
15 JUL 2026 → OCT 2026Tokenized asset administration built to deploy inside the customer's own infrastructure. Real estate is the beachhead, not the boundary.
DGH Fund + StudioTransfer agency and recordkeeping
The regulated register of who owns what. Not optional for a single compliant tokenized security in America.
SEC staff guidance confirms a registered transfer agent may use a distributed ledger as its official Master Securityholder File, with no duplicate off-chain records required. The chain stops being a copy of the register and becomes the register. In October, DTCC then makes tokenized recordkeeping a standard service feature for DTC participants.
MAY 2025 → OCT 2026AKRU Transfer Agent LLC registered with the SEC effective 4 July 2026, which makes it a legally recognised backbone for securityholder registries rather than a tokenization vendor sitting beside one. It ships as white-label B2B infrastructure: accounting firms, CPAs and fund administrators run it under their own branding for onboarding, capital calls, distribution waterfalls and 1099 compliance. Vertalo has been an SEC-registered transfer agent since 2019 and tokenizing in production since 2018, with $500M+ of assets on chain, 100+ issuers and clients and 200K+ investors on one shared ledger serving as the securityholder register itself.
DGH StudioCustody and wallets
Who holds the keys, who approves the transaction, and who is liable when it goes wrong. The question every institutional allocator asks before any other.
The GENIUS Act permits banks to custody stablecoins and reserves and to issue tokenized deposits. FDIC proposed its implementing rules in April.
JUL 2025 → APR 2026Ownera runs a custodian service plus a connector for digital custody tech providers: one unified ID per user controlled by a cryptographic key, with approval flows for any transaction on the network. Wallet addresses act as the network's addresses, the way IP addresses do. Its Zodia Solutions partnership puts policy, credit and limit checks, asset locking and reconciliation in front of settlement, so a bank's controls run before the instruction executes. AKRU, as an SEC-registered transfer agent, is the legally recognised registry backbone underneath, which a tokenization vendor cannot be on its own.
DGH Fund + StudioPricing and market signal
Two questions, not one. What is this asset worth, in a continuous machine-readable form for assets that historically traded once a decade. And what is the market actually doing about it: where attention, demand and behaviour are moving across the category.
DTCC taps Chainlink for its Collateral AppChain, automating pricing, valuation and settlement 24/7 across markets and chains. Note what that solves and what it does not: the industry is automating price feeds for collateral that already trades, and has built nothing for what the market thinks of an asset class that does not.
Q4 2026Aivre carries valuation for property. Ownera connects directly to oracles and exchanges for real-time data. LunarCrush covers the other half, real-time data and analytics on real-world assets as a category and on the market generally, including the social layer: what the public is actually saying and doing, in structured machine-readable form. Partial, because the signal side is strong and the valuation side still stops at property.
DGB Studio + Fund · DGH Fund + StudioFinance it
Where the stablecoin economy stops being a crypto story.Credit rails
Moving loans between lenders. The plumbing under every secondary credit market, and the layer that decides who can lend at all.
Tokenized US Treasuries reach roughly $12–15B, up from $8.9B in January. Collateral is migrating to digital form faster than credit markets are adapting to it.
2026Both ends of the credit market, and the rails underneath them. Thurman Labs runs loan-sale infrastructure for community lenders and CDFIs, settling in USDC, serving the borrowers banks are about to abandon, and now sells loan servicing to those same lenders, which is how this layer and layer 13 became one company. Dolomite is the on-chain equivalent: modular lending and margin built to plug into regulated systems so traditional firms can deploy capital on-chain. Ownera is the infrastructure both of them move across. The same routing that carries collateral between institutions carries credit, so a loan or a position can be financed against a counterparty the originator has no integration with.
DGB Studio · DGH Fund + StudioBalance sheet
Somebody has to actually fund the loan before it is ever a token. The oldest layer on the map and still the one that gates everything above it.
No milestone required. Private credit has been doing this quietly for decades. The only thing changing is what the capital can be wrapped in afterwards.
STRUCTURALTwo balance sheets against the same asset class. Build Team Capital does residential real-estate private credit: short-term loans to small and mid-sized builders, fix-and-flip operators and foreclosure-auction buyers, through its lending vehicle RoboYield, now past its first full portfolio turnover. Lit Financial lends against the equity already sitting in the home, through equity lines of credit. That is the largest pool of trapped collateral in the country, and it is what most of the layers above eventually point at. Unglamorous, entirely off-chain, and the reason anything above it has something to tokenize.
DGB Studio · DGB Studio + FundMove it
The layer the largest institutions on earth just finished testing.Collateral mobility
Moving a tokenized asset between institutions and across chains so it can be posted as margin without being sold first.
ISDA and GDF publish their assessment: tokenized money market funds work as US institutional collateral under all three tokenization models. Over 300 participants across 120+ firms including BlackRock, Citi, JPMorgan, Franklin Templeton, CME and ICE. 48 firms ran the sandbox simulations on Ownera.
7 JUL 2026The FinP2P protocol, an open orchestration layer doing for financial markets what TCP/IP did for the internet. Routers connect to counterparty routers with no bilateral integration. EVM chains, Canton, Corda, Hedera and Solana. Over $5B in monthly trading volume, largest single transaction $1B. Co-founded in our studio in 2018.
DGH Fund + StudioDistribution
Connecting the finished asset to the institutions and investors who will actually hold it.
Goldman Sachs issues a blockchain-native real estate fund on GS DAP, with Apex Group administering, Archax as custodian and primary distribution partner, LRC Group managing the fund, and Ownera facilitating connectivity between the participants and the distribution channels. Separately, 50+ firms join DTCC's tokenization working group ahead of October.
4 JUN 2026The same network, pointed the other way. A marketplace of production SuperApps sits on top, with 50+ institutional partners including J.P. Morgan's Kinexys, State Street, Lloyds, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, Franklin Templeton and DTCC itself. ISO 20022 and FIX connectors reach the legacy stack; DvP, PvP and repo settle natively.
DGH Fund + StudioSecondary liquidity
Somewhere to sell it, or better, somewhere you no longer have to. Liquidity is what happens when any holder can reach any buyer, at any institution, in any jurisdiction, on any chain, without a bilateral integration in the way, and when the asset can be borrowed against instead of sold.
ISDA found 68% of variation margin arrives as cash, largely because posting the asset itself was not possible. Tokenized funds accepted directly as collateral turn a forced sale into a transfer. That is liquidity created by connectivity rather than by a venue.
2026Four jobs. Ownera is reachability: any asset reachable from any institution, in any jurisdiction, against any counterparty, across 154+ chains and the legacy stack via ISO 20022 and FIX. Dolomite is the on-chain side of the same idea, a lending hub where tokenized Treasuries, real-estate fund shares and corporate credit tokens are deposited as collateral to borrow against, with isolated risk per position and CCIP keeping assets from being trapped on one network. Cardinal builds the instruments that give someone a reason to take the other side, perpetuals for levering a yield spread with a hedge that pays out when the spread inverts. AKRU and Vertalo hold the regulated register underneath, because an asset with no valid instant record of ownership cannot change hands at all.
DGH Fund + Studio · DGB FundServicing and bookkeeping
Keeping the books, collecting the payments, handling the defaults, reporting to holders, filing the tax documents. Every month, for the life of the asset.
No standard has been written for this layer and no institution has announced one, which is usually read as nobody having solved it. That reading is wrong. It is already running in production, quietly, on live funds with real investors holding real tokenized shares. It looks empty from outside because the infrastructure is white-label and ships under its customers' brands, which is also why this layer is nearly impossible to displace once won.
LIVE, UNANNOUNCEDServicing splits three ways and we sit in each. AKRU runs multiple live tokenized funds end to end: it issues the tokenized shares and then serves as fund administrator for those same funds. An on-chain cap table derives 87% of K-1 content automatically, and a QA gate blocks an entire tax batch if any LP allocation drifts by more than a single cent from the master control totals, which is what audit-ready has to mean before an accountant will sign. Livsee services the property itself, automating leasing, lead capture and renter matching across multifamily. Thurman Labs covers the third, loan servicing, the part nobody had rebuilt. It is a shipped product, sold to CDFIs, not a roadmap item. All three jobs are running.
DGH Fund + Studio · DGB Fund · DGB StudioPortable compliance and identity
Know-your-customer that travels with the asset instead of being rebuilt from scratch at every venue it touches.
The GENIUS Act pushes stablecoin compliance directly into banks' back offices. The obligation now exists in law well ahead of the infrastructure to meet it.
2026Ownera unifies user and asset identity across FinP2P: one ID per user under cryptographic key control, with the approval flow travelling alongside the transaction instead of being rebuilt at every venue the asset reaches. Partial, because that portability holds across the networks FinP2P connects and not yet across the industry as a whole.
DGH Fund + StudioExpand what counts as an asset
Once the stack works, the definition of "asset" stops holding still.New asset classes
Things that were never ownable becoming ownable. This is where the stack stops being a better version of finance and starts being a different one.
No institution gets to set the boundary of what counts as an asset. The market moves it, one class at a time. Treasuries were a curiosity on chain in 2023 and are a multi-billion-dollar market three years later; private credit, funds and real estate are on the same curve behind them. None of them cross back.
ONGOINGRetail investment in professional athletes' future earnings. AI music catalogs that are themselves licensable, monetizable assets. And a share of an owner-occupied home, tokenized for liquidity, which is the largest pool of trapped household wealth in the country finally becoming divisible.
DGB Fund + StudioThe same map, read the other way
Layer by layer, the stack looks like fifteen separate problems. Company by company, it looks like something else. Sixteen companies hold thirty-two positions across the fifteen layers, and the company sitting on the most of them is the one whose entire job is connecting the others. Depth on this chart is worth more than breadth: a company already standing on one layer is the cheapest way to reach the next one.
The rules landed first
A map like this is only worth drawing if the ground under it has stopped moving. In the sixteen months from May 2025 to this September, the statutes, the regulators and the market infrastructure all arrived, mostly in the same direction and mostly faster than the people building for it expected. Every item below is a public record, and every one of them has already happened. Only the last piece of market structure is still unresolved, and it is marked as such.
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May 2025RegulatorA distributed ledger can be the official register
SEC staff confirm a registered transfer agent may use a distributed ledger as its Master Securityholder File, with no duplicate off-chain record. The chain stops being a copy of the register and becomes the register.
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Jul 2025LawThe GENIUS Act is signed
The first federal framework for payment stablecoins. Banks may custody stablecoins and reserves and issue tokenized deposits.
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Jul 2025LawThe CLARITY Act passes the House, 294 to 134
Market structure: a statutory split of authority between the SEC and the CFTC, and the first unambiguous classification test for when a token is a commodity.
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2 Dec 2025LawEnglish law recognises a digital asset as property
The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act receives Royal Assent, confirming that a thing is not prevented from being the object of personal property rights merely because it is neither a thing in possession nor a thing in action. The jurisdiction most cross-border financial contracts are written under settles the question of whether you can actually own a token.
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Apr 2026RegulatorFDIC proposes its GENIUS implementing rules
The framework stops being a statute and starts being supervised practice, with transitional deadlines running to 2028.
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18 May 2026RegulatorThe FCA and the Bank of England set out a shared vision
Prudential treatment, tokenised collateral and settlement instruments, addressed together. The Bank commits to work toward tokenised equivalents of already eligible assets being usable as collateral at central counterparties and in its own operations, and to extend RTGS and CHAPS toward near 24/7 settlement. Sixteen firms are live in the Digital Securities Sandbox.
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4 Jun 2026InstitutionGoldman Sachs issues a blockchain-native fund
A tokenized real estate fund on GS DAP, with Apex administering, Archax as custodian and distributor, LRC managing, and Ownera connecting the participants to the distribution channels.
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7 Jul 2026Market infrastructureISDA and GDF answer the collateral question
Tokenized money market funds work as US institutional collateral under all three tokenization models. Over 300 participants across 120-plus firms. 48 of them ran the sandbox simulations on Ownera.
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15 Jul 2026Market infrastructureThe DTCC tokenizes assets for real production trades
Assets held at The Depository Trust Company converted into tokens and used in live trades, not a sandbox.
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8 Aug 2026LawThe Senate files to proceed on CLARITY
The motion sets up the first floor vote. Yield, ethics and enforcement provisions are still unresolved. This is the one item on this list that has not landed.
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9 Sep 2026InstitutionU.S. Bank launches USBDC
A live cross-border payment between its North American and European entities on the public Stellar chain, among the first public-blockchain deployments by a large US bank. The release names collateral mobility as a target use.
Read down that list and the pattern is hard to miss. The law arrived, then the rules, then the depositories, then the banks, on both sides of the Atlantic and largely in the same direction. Nothing on it is an announcement of intent. Each one is a thing that already happened, on a date, in public.
The institutions are not coming. They arrived.
The usual objection to a map like this is that the technology is ready and the industry is not. So here are the institutions in the pilots, working groups, networks and partnerships our companies run or take part in. Not forecasts, and not logos borrowed from a conference sponsor page. Some are direct commercial partners, some are participants alongside us in the same programmes. Each group below says which, and the first group is published verbatim by GDF and ISDA, not by us.
Over 300 participants across more than 120 firms assessed whether tokenized money market funds work as US collateral. The report's own words: live near-production use cases were "orchestrated and demonstrated in the GDF Industry Sandbox, powered by Ownera." The contributing firms are published in the report. Among them:
Institutions, platforms and applications publicly announced as connected to FinP2P, building on the SuperApps store, or taking part in the Goldman Sachs tokenized real estate fund:
Chains our companies run in production, connect to, or work with across Ownera, AKRU, Vertalo, Dolomite, Thurman Labs and Lit Financial, plus another 160 or so reachable through the LayerZero connector:
The bodies that had to say yes, and the firms that wrote the analysis. Aivre is verified by both GSEs; AKRU and Vertalo are SEC-registered transfer agents; EY and Hogan Lovells co-authored the collateral mobility work with GDF and Ownera:
Where LunarCrush market and social data reaches the models everyone is building on:
One hundred and twelve institutions and networks, one venture portfolio. The largest asset manager on earth, two of the depositories that clear the world's securities, two exchanges, two government-sponsored enterprises, two federal regulators, and both of the frontier labs. The question stopped being whether these institutions will adopt this. They have. What is left is the order they do it in, and how long each integration takes.
Every piece exists. The rest is a matter of time.
Most people read this category as a hunt for the one missing invention, usually an exchange where tokenized assets will finally trade. That is the wrong shape. Liquidity is not a place, it is a property of the network. When any asset can be traded from any financial institution, in any jurisdiction, against any counterparty, on any chain, instantly, the set of reachable buyers stops being a handful and becomes everyone. Options grow exponentially and things start moving. Add the ability to borrow against the asset rather than sell it, and a holder gets liquidity without a buyer existing at all.
Walk back up the map and the same thing is true at every layer. Origination, valuation, issuance, the regulated register, custody, credit, collateral mobility, distribution, servicing. Every one of them exists in production somewhere today. Some are thinner than others, and continuous valuation for assets that rarely trade is the thinnest. But none of it is waiting on an invention any more. It is waiting on adoption, integration and sequencing, which is a question of time rather than possibility.
That gap is not an oversight in the research. It is the reason we built the studio. We do not wait for these companies to appear and then compete to invest in them. We identify the missing layer, recruit the founder, incorporate alongside them, and own at founder economics from the first day. That is how Ownera went from a whiteboard in 2018 to the network 48 firms ran their collateral simulations on, moving over $5B a month.
It is also why this map moves. Loan servicing was the thinnest thing on it a year ago, and the company that closed the gap was Thurman Labs, which was already in the portfolio one row above for credit rails. It now sells loan servicing to the same CDFIs it was already moving loans for. That is what owning the layer next door is worth: the company best placed to close a gap is usually one you already built, sitting beside it.
What's your take?
- We drew fifteen layers. Which one would you add, and where would you draw the lines differently?
- Which layer is thinner than it looks here, and who should we be investing in there?
- If you are building one of them, we would rather hear it from you than read about it later.
A hybrid venture studio and venture fund. When the company already exists, we want to be the earliest check in it. When it does not exist yet, we build it. We identify the missing layer, recruit the founder, incorporate alongside them, and own at founder economics from day one.
Co-founder of DGB. One of the earliest and most consistent institutional believers in this entire category, long before it had a name.
Founding Partner, and the author of this map. Co-founded Ownera in 2018 and sits on its board, the network 48 firms ran their collateral simulations on. Building tokenized assets since the idea was a fringe conference topic.
Founding Partner. A crypto-native founder-operator who built Totle and sold it to Coinbase, and who advises our founders as someone who has actually done it.