---
title: "Four waves of RWA, 2017 to 2026"
author: Mariusz Szyma
date: 2026-09-15
lang: en
canonical: https://szyma.co/en/blog/rwa/four-waves/
series: "RWA: Past, Present and Future"
series_part: 3/11
series_url: https://szyma.co/en/blog/rwa/
data_as_of: 4–10 Sep 2026
---

# Four waves of RWA, 2017 to 2026

Tokenization has been tried four times since 2017, on four different classes of asset, and the explanations usually given for how each attempt ended do not survive the numbers those attempts left behind. One variable separates the four: whether a buyer for the asset already existed on the chain before the token did. Technology, regulation and market conditions all changed across those nine years, and none of them sorted the winners from the losers as cleanly as that one question.

## What you'll learn

- Name the four waves and the asset class each one started from.
- Explain why the 2021 bull market did not revive the security-token market.
- State what the unsecured on-chain credit model cost, protocol by protocol.
- Read a wave-four headline number and say which category it counts.
- Ask the first question about a new RWA product before asking about the chain.

## Wave one: security tokens raised capital and built no market

**ICO** is short for initial coin offering, a sale of tokens with no basis in securities law, and by 2018 those sales were falling under enforcement. **STO**, security token offering, was the industry's answer: the same fundraising run as a regulated offering of an instrument that is a security under the law, a share or a bond or a certificate. Blockchain Capital's BCAP, sold on 10 April 2017, is the first one on the record.

The money that came in was the first sign that the market had not bought the product.

| Measure | Value | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| STOs, 2017 | 2 offerings, ~22 mn USD | 🟡 |
| STOs, 2018 | 28 offerings, 442 mn USD | 🟡 |
| STOs, 2019 | 55 offerings, 452 mn USD | 🟡 |
| ICOs, 2017, for calibration | ~5.6 bn USD | 🟡 |
| Secondary trading, all security tokens, full-year 2019 | 2,410,608 USD | 🟡 |
| Secondary trading, daily average, 2019 | 7,156 USD | 🟡 |
| Secondary-market capitalization, January 2019 | 229,501,221 USD | 🟡 |
| Secondary-market capitalization, December 2019 | 76,062,199 USD | 🟡 |
| tZERO's share of that capitalization | 58% | 🟡 |

The best year of the whole STO era, 2019, raised about 8% of what ICOs raised in 2017 alone, and it did so carrying a story about regulatory compliance and institutional money that ICOs never had.

Capital raised is the weaker evidence, though. **Secondary trading** is the buying and selling that happens between investors after an offering closes, and it was the entire promise of tokenizing an illiquid asset. For security tokens it started in earnest when tZERO opened trading on 24 January 2019, which makes 2019 the first year with a full set of data. Every security token in the world traded 2,410,608 USD that year, an average of 7,156 USD a day.

The largest offering of the wave shows what an investor actually received for that money. tZERO, a subsidiary of Overstock.com, had to report as part of a public company, which is why its deal is the best documented of the era.

| tZERO offering | Detail |
|---|---|
| Opened | 18 December 2017, initially as an ICO |
| Closed | 6 August 2018 |
| Target | 250 mn USD |
| Raised | 134 mn USD from more than 1,000 investors |
| Of which | 30 mn USD settling intercompany debt with Overstock |
| Tokens minted | 12 October 2018, into tZERO's own custodial wallet |
| Lock-up | until 10 January 2019, 90 days |
| Trading opened | 24 January 2019, via Dinosaur Financial Group (broker-dealer) and PRO Securities |

**ATS** stands for alternative trading system, a venue registered with the SEC for trading securities away from an exchange, and for a US security token it was the only lawful route to a secondary market. PRO Securities is the ATS in that last row. The buyer of the wave's biggest offering got a token that lived on a public blockchain and sat in the issuer's wallet for a quarter, and that could then be resold only to another accredited investor. Every restriction of a private placement was preserved, and the cost and technical risk of a blockchain were added on top.

![Security tokens raised capital and built no market: 5.6 bn USD raised by ICOs in 2017, 452 mn USD in the best STO year of 2019, and 2,410,608 USD of secondary trading across the whole industry in that same year, which is 7,156 USD a day, on Security Token Market's 2019 annual data and PwC issuance figures cited by LCX.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/sto-capital-vs-turnover.02b9440e.svg)

## What actually killed wave one

Two explanations circulate, and the wave's own data falsifies both.

The first is the bear market of 2018 and 2019. It did not help, and it does not account for what happened two years later.

> **Example:** In March 2021, at the peak of the crypto bull market, every security token in the world traded 7,187,959 USD in the month, and 96% of that ran through one platform, tZERO. Real estate, the category the entire narrative had been built on, traded 77,764 USD that month. One token, Aspen Coin, was 64,365 USD of it, or 83%, against a market capitalization of 22.5 mn USD. Three tenths of one percent of that asset's capitalization changed hands in the best month the market ever had.

The second explanation is regulatory hostility. On 28 January 2026 three divisions of the SEC issued a joint *Statement on Tokenized Securities* saying that a tokenized security remains the same security under existing federal law, whether the record of ownership sits on a cryptographic network or off it. The statement grants no relief and creates no new regime. Eight years after the wave, the regulator confirmed in writing the rule that applied during it.

The constraint that followed from that rule was arithmetic rather than hostile. An offering sold under Regulation D, the US safe harbour that exempts a private placement from registration, produces restricted securities, and restricted securities cannot be resold to the broad market. So the natural buyer of a wave-one token was another accredited investor, and an accredited investor who wanted that asset could buy it more cheaply and more simply through an ordinary private syndication. The issuer paid a liquidity premium and received no liquidity.

Harbor's deal is the cleanest failure of the wave, and it has nothing to do with trading volumes. The company tokenized a student housing block in Columbia, South Carolina, the Hub at Columbia: 260 units, a deal of about 20 mn USD, cut into 955 tokens of 21,000 USD each. On 11 April 2019 it collapsed, because the property's existing mortgage lender would not agree to the change in ownership structure.

No regulator refused it, no investors failed to show up, and no contract broke. The legal chain of any RWA runs asset, then the legal entity that owns the asset, then equity in that entity, then the token, then the holder. Harbor built the last two links well and the first one vetoed the deal. An asset carrying debt, a covenant or a change-of-control clause has a party in that chain who can block tokenization and no particular reason to allow it. [Chapter 1](/en/blog/rwa/what-is-an-rwa/) sets out the three-condition test that this chain sits behind.

## Wave two: unsecured credit failed in every case it was tried

Wave two, from 2020 to 2022, ran in the opposite direction from wave one. Wave one tried to bring investors from traditional finance onto a blockchain. Wave two brought assets from traditional finance to investors who were on a blockchain already, and those investors were protocols holding enormous stablecoin treasuries that earned nothing.

The demand was real. The construction was not. Maple Finance lent to trading firms and other institutions on reputation, with nothing pledged against the loan. After FTX collapsed in November 2022 the lenders on that platform took roughly 54 mn USD of bad debt: Orthogonal Trading accounted for about 36 mn USD across eight loans, after concealing its exposure to FTX, and Auros for about 3 mn USD more.

**Overcollateralization** means a borrower pledges assets worth more than the loan, so that a falling collateral price can be liquidated before the lender is out of pocket. Maple rebuilt on it in May 2024, at 150% and above, and a Spark research note from around August 2026 reports no credit losses since the change and about 2 bn USD of value locked in the protocol. Goldfinch, funded by a16z, ran the same unsecured experiment and did not change the model: more than 100 mn USD of loans originated, about 18 mn USD of defaults, which is 18% of the volume, and a wind-down vote in June 2026 with roughly 56 mn USD of principal still unpaid.

Two protocols, one model, and no counterexample in the data behind this series. Everything that works in on-chain private credit in 2026 has collateral, a whitelist of borrowers and valuation by an outside administrator, which is not a technological advance but a return to standards the credit market settled on long before blockchains. [Chapter 8](/en/blog/rwa/rwa-in-defi/) follows that collateral rule into the lending loops built on RWA tokens today.

![RWA failures from 2019 to 2026 fall into credit risk, operational and legal risk, and the issuer's own decision to close a product, while the fourth lane, technical failure of a smart contract, stays empty across the whole period, on the author's knowledge base compiled to Sep 2026.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/rwa-failures-timeline.00056288.svg)

## Wave three: Treasuries worked because the buyer was already on-chain and desperate

Wave three, in 2023 and 2024, is the one that worked. The usual explanation is that Treasury bills are the easiest asset to tokenize. True, and not enough: simplicity does not explain why it happened in 2023 rather than in 2019.

Four conditions had to hold at once. Every bill of a given maturity is identical to every other, so the token is fungible because the asset is. The price is public and nobody disputes it, which solves the hardest operational problem in RWA by choosing the asset rather than by building technology. A bill has no tenant, no roof and no covenants. And the fourth condition decided the rest: the buyer was already on the chain and had no alternative. In 2023 the federal funds rate passed 5% while tens of billions of dollars of stablecoins sat on public chains earning zero, including the billions of USDC that MakerDAO held in its Peg Stability Module at no yield at all.

That buyer proved itself before the products arrived. In January 2023 MakerDAO deployed 500 mn USD into short-term Treasuries through the Monetalis Clydesdale structure, which established that a protocol could buy half a billion dollars of government paper and have the operation hold.

| Event | Date |
|---|---|
| FOBXX (Franklin Templeton) live on Stellar | 6 April 2021 |
| MakerDAO deploys 500 mn USD via Monetalis Clydesdale | 4 January 2023 |
| OUSG (Ondo) | 26 January 2023 |
| USDY (Ondo) | August 2023 |
| USTB (Superstate) | early 2024 |
| BUIDL (BlackRock) on Ethereum | 20 March 2024 |
| Tokenized Treasuries pass 10 bn USD | 11 February 2026 |
| 67.2% of the RWA market on CoinGecko's methodology, ~59,000 holders | 31 March 2026 |

The loudest date in that table is not the turning point. The quieter one is 6 April 2021, when Franklin Templeton's FOBXX went live as the first SEC-registered fund to use a public blockchain as part of its share registry, three years before BlackRock arrived. Its own prospectus describes a hybrid of book-entry records and public chains under the transfer agent's control, so the first-mover claim and the filing do not quite agree, and [chapter 1](/en/blog/rwa/what-is-an-rwa/) keeps both readings.

BUIDL became the institutional reference product: a British Virgin Islands fund company registered on 18 September 2023, offered under Rule 506(c) and Section 3(c)(7), a 5 mn USD minimum subscription, and more than 100 mn USD of dividends paid through December 2025.

The contrast that defines this wave sits in the same data. Tokenized real estate was about 457 mn USD in July 2026 and the category was shrinking. Eight years after Harbor, the asset wave one started with still does not work, and the reason is the one Harbor found in 2019 rather than anything about the state of the technology.

## Wave four: the biggest numbers and the smallest market

Wave four, running through 2025 and 2026, has a different product from the three before it. It does not sell a market to investors; it sells operational savings to institutions, by moving their existing books onto a distributed ledger.

That shows up immediately in the two ways this market is measured. **Distributed** assets can be moved to a wallet outside the issuing platform and sent between wallets. **Represented** assets cannot, and exist to record a position on a chain rather than to put it in an investor's hands. [Chapter 1](/en/blog/rwa/what-is-an-rwa/) sets out both.

| Measure | March 2026 | June 2026 | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| Distributed | 26.66 bn USD | 26.71 bn USD | 🟡 |
| Represented | 342.60 bn USD | 345.07 bn USD | 🟡 |
| Canton Network's share of represented, per a Sep 2026 reading | ~371.3 bn USD, 85% to 98% | | 🔴, not reproduced |

Between March and June 2026 the tradable half of that table was flat and the untradable half grew. Headlines described a growing tokenization market during those months. What grew was the register.

> **Watch out:** Canton is a permissioned institutional network where a retail investor has no account, so its aggregate figures describe activity inside a closed system rather than a market anyone can trade. The number in the table above comes from an aggregator, and a research pass on 10 September 2026 could not reproduce it from RWA.xyz or DefiLlama. It sits in the table with that flag and never in a sentence of this chapter's argument.

The construction of wave-four products matches their purpose. **Feeder fund** is the name for a vehicle that raises capital from investors and invests it into a single master fund, which does the actual investing; the arrangement is older than any of this and [chapter 2](/en/blog/rwa/before-tokenization/) covers it. Apollo's ACRED and Hamilton Lane's HLSCOPE tokenize that feeder rather than the master fund, which bolts a distribution channel onto an existing structure and leaves the structure alone.

The honest second half of this picture is usually missing from critical accounts. Distributed value grew roughly six- to sevenfold between the start of 2025 and August 2026, from about 5 to 6 bn USD to about 38.3 bn USD. Reclassification does not explain that, because the taxonomy change of November 2025 cut the reported numbers rather than inflating them. The tradable market is growing fast, and it is about ten times smaller than the figure above 400 bn USD that reaches a headline.

## The rule that explains all four waves at once

Four waves, four asset classes, one variable. Wave one tokenized real estate, venture fund interests and private company equity: heterogeneous assets with no continuous price, bought by investors who were off-chain and had better tools for buying them. Wave two found a buyer with money already on the chain and burned a lending model that had no collateral behind it. Wave three put the validated buyer and the easiest possible asset together and worked. Wave four moves institutional ledgers onto distributed infrastructure, which produces the largest numbers in the category and the smallest market an investor can participate in.

Tokenization never created demand for an asset. It connected to demand that already existed, and where the demand had to be manufactured first, it lost.

> **My take:** I treat the phrase "it was too early" as a claim to be checked rather than an explanation, because the one test available falsifies it. At the top of the 2021 bull market, with better infrastructure than 2018 had, the security-token secondary market was still 96% one platform and real estate still traded less in a month than a single apartment costs. If timing had been the constraint, that is where it would have shown.

So the first question about any new RWA product is not the chain, the token standard or the jurisdiction. It is who the buyer is and where that buyer sits today. An answer along the lines of "an institutional investor who currently buys the same thing more cheaply off-chain" describes wave one in new packaging. The second question is the one Harbor's mortgage lender answered on 11 April 2019: which party in the legal chain above the token can veto this, and what reason does it have to agree. [Chapter 10](/en/blog/rwa/what-works-and-whats-next/) scores every wave discussed here against a harder four-criteria test.

![Four waves of RWA from 2017 to 2026, one lane each, with the events that dated them, on the author's chronology compiled to Sep 2026.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/four-waves-timeline.08d3d261.svg)

## Key takeaways

1. The best year of the STO era, 2019, raised 452 mn USD across 55 offerings, about 8% of the roughly 5.6 bn USD that ICOs raised in 2017 alone.
2. Every security token in the world traded 2,410,608 USD on the secondary market in 2019, an average of 7,156 USD a day, which is the measurable failure of wave one rather than a characterization of it.
3. The bear-market explanation fails on wave one's own data: in March 2021, at the top of the bull market, monthly secondary volume was 7,187,959 USD with 96% on one platform, and the whole real estate category traded 77,764 USD.
4. The regulatory-hostility explanation fails too: the SEC's joint statement of 28 January 2026 confirms that tokenization changes nothing about a security's legal status, which was already the rule in 2018.
5. Harbor's Hub at Columbia deal died on 11 April 2019 because a mortgage lender refused a change of ownership structure, three links above the token in the legal chain.
6. Unsecured on-chain credit failed in every case in this material: Maple took about 54 mn USD of bad debt in 2022 and rebuilt on 150%-plus overcollateralization in May 2024, and Goldfinch voted to wind down in June 2026 with about 56 mn USD unpaid.
7. Tokenized Treasuries worked because the buyer was on-chain first: the federal funds rate passed 5% in 2023 while stablecoin balances earned zero, MakerDAO deployed 500 mn USD in January 2023, and the category passed 10 bn USD on 11 February 2026, while tokenized real estate was about 457 mn USD and shrinking in July 2026.
8. Between March and June 2026 distributed value moved from 26.66 to 26.71 bn USD while represented value moved from 342.60 to 345.07 bn USD, so the growth in that window was in the category that cannot be traded.

## Glossary

- **ICO**: an initial coin offering, a token sale run with no basis in securities law. Enforcement against ICOs is what produced the STO.
- **STO**: a security token offering, a sale of a token that is a security under the law, conducted as a regulated offering.
- **Secondary trading**: buying and selling between investors after an offering closes, as distinct from the offering itself.
- **ATS**: an alternative trading system, a venue registered with the SEC for trading securities away from an exchange. For a US security token it was the only lawful route to a secondary market.
- **Restricted securities**: instruments sold under an exemption such as Regulation D, which cannot be freely resold to the broad market.
- **Lock-up**: a period during which a buyer may not sell the instrument they bought.
- **Overcollateralization**: pledging collateral worth more than the loan, so the lender can liquidate into a falling price and still be repaid.
- **Feeder fund**: a fund that raises capital from investors and invests it into a master fund, which does the actual investing. ACRED and HLSCOPE tokenize the feeder.
- **Distributed assets**: RWA.xyz's label for tokens that can leave the issuing platform and move between wallets.
- **Represented assets**: RWA.xyz's label for tokens that cannot, and that record a position on a chain rather than distribute it.

## Go deeper

- [What an RWA actually is](/en/blog/rwa/what-is-an-rwa/): the three-condition test and the legal chain that Harbor's mortgage lender broke are defined there.
- [RWA in DeFi](/en/blog/rwa/rwa-in-defi/): wave two's collateral lesson is the direct ancestor of the RWA-collateral loops running today.
- [What works and what's next](/en/blog/rwa/what-works-and-whats-next/): every wave here is scored again against four harder criteria.
- 🟢 SEC, *Statement on Tokenized Securities*, 28 Jan 2026, Divisions of Corporation Finance, Investment Management, and Trading and Markets, sec.gov.
- 🟢 tZERO / Overstock, *tZERO Issues Preferred tZERO Security Tokens*, 16 Oct 2018 (GlobeNewswire and Overstock investor relations): mint 12 Oct 2018, lock-up to 10 Jan 2019.
- 🟢 MakerDAO, *MIP65 deployed $500 million into short-term treasury bonds*, 4 Jan 2023, and vote.makerdao.com, Monetalis Clydesdale (RWA007-A) onboarding, 5 Oct 2022.
- 🟡 Security Token Group / Medium, *Security Token Market Secondary Trading Analysis: 2019*.

## Sources

- 🟡 LCX, *STO Market Size: The State of the Industry of Tokenization and Security Token Offerings*, citing PwC: 2017 (2 offerings, ~22 mn USD), 2018 (28 offerings, 442 mn USD), 2019 (55 offerings, 452 mn USD). The original PwC report could not be located.
- 🟡 Author's knowledge base, module 2 (history): ICOs raised about 5.6 bn USD in 2017; Blockchain Capital's BCAP, 10 Apr 2017, as the first STO; the four-wave framing and its dates.
- 🟡 Security Token Group / Medium, *Security Token Market Secondary Trading Analysis: 2019*: 2,410,608 USD for the year, 214,683 USD a month, 7,156 USD a day; secondary-market capitalization from 229,501,221 USD in January to 76,062,199 USD in December; tZERO 58% of that capitalization.
- 🟡 Philipp Sandner / Medium, *The Secondary Market for Security Tokens From a Real Estate Perspective*, Mar 2021: 7,187,959 USD of monthly volume, 96% on tZERO, real estate 77,764 USD, Aspen Coin 64,365 USD against a 22.5 mn USD capitalization.
- 🟢 tZERO / Overstock, *tZERO Issues Preferred tZERO Security Tokens*, 16 Oct 2018: mint 12 Oct 2018 into the issuer's custodial wallet, lock-up to 10 Jan 2019.
- 🟡 Finadium, *tZero raises $134 million in compliant security token offering, plans secondary market*, 2018: target 250 mn USD, more than 1,000 investors, 30 mn USD of intercompany debt settlement.
- 🟡 Markets Media, *tZero Begins Secondary Trading*, Jan 2019: Dinosaur Financial Group and PRO Securities ATS, 24 Jan 2019.
- 🟡 SiliconANGLE, *Harbor launches $20M 'tokenized' investments in student residence*, 28 Nov 2018: 955 tokens at 21,000 USD, 260 units.
- 🟡 Crowdfund Insider, *Harbor's First Security Token Deal For A Real Estate Offering Has Collapsed*, 11 Apr 2019: the mortgage lender as the reason.
- 🟢 SEC, *Statement on Tokenized Securities*, 28 Jan 2026: a tokenized security remains the same security under existing federal law; no relief and no new regime.
- 🟢 SEC, *Regulation D Offerings*: the 506(b) and 506(c) exemptions and restricted-securities status.
- 🟡 Spark, *Tokenized Private Credit: How On-Chain Lending Is Disrupting a $1.7T Market*, ~Aug 2026: Maple's ~54 mn USD of bad debt in 2022, Orthogonal 36 mn USD across eight loans after hiding FTX exposure, Auros ~3 mn USD, the May 2024 move to 150%-plus collateral, no credit losses since and ~2 bn USD locked; Goldfinch's >100 mn USD originated, ~18 mn USD of defaults, June 2026 wind-down vote and ~56 mn USD unpaid.
- 🟢 vote.makerdao.com, Monetalis Clydesdale (RWA007-A) onboarding, 5 Oct 2022; 🟢/🟡 MakerDAO, *MIP65 deployed $500 million into short-term treasury bonds*, 4 Jan 2023.
- 🟢 Stellar Development Foundation and Franklin Templeton: FOBXX live 6 Apr 2021; 🟢 Franklin Templeton FOBXX Form 485BPOS (EDGAR), describing a hybrid of book-entry and public-chain records under the transfer agent's control.
- 🟢 Securitize press release, *BlackRock Launches Its First Tokenized Fund, BUIDL, on the Ethereum Network*: launch 20 Mar 2024, Rule 506(c) and Section 3(c)(7).
- 🔴 Coinpaprika, 19 Jun 2026: BUIDL's BVI registration on 18 Sep 2023 and the 5 mn USD minimum subscription, both flagged in the author's knowledge base as operational detail not confirmed in the offering documents.
- 🟢 Author's knowledge base, module 2: OUSG from 26 Jan 2023, USDY from Aug 2023, USTB from early 2024, more than 100 mn USD of BUIDL dividends paid through Dec 2025, the tokenized-Treasury category passing 10 bn USD on 11 Feb 2026, 67.2% of the market on CoinGecko's methodology at 31 Mar 2026, and about 59,000 holders (58,658 holders and 62,959 addresses, RWA.xyz via CoinLaw, May 2026).
- 🟡 BeInCrypto Research / Yahoo Finance, *Reality of RWA Tokenization in 2026*, Jul 2026: tokenized real estate about 457 mn USD and shrinking.
- 🟡 insights4vc, Mar 2026, with June readings from the author's knowledge base: distributed 26.66 to 26.71 bn USD and represented 342.60 to 345.07 bn USD between March and June 2026.
- 🟢 Author's knowledge base, module 13: distributed value of about 5 to 6 bn USD at the start of 2025 and about 38.3 bn USD in Aug 2026.
- 🟢 RWA.xyz, *A New Framework for Tokenized Assets: Distributed & Represented*, 21 Nov 2025: the taxonomy that cut reported figures rather than inflating them.
- 🔴 CoinPaprika relaying RWA.xyz, Aug 2026: Canton Network at about 371.3 bn USD of represented value, 85% to 98% of the category. Recorded as unverified per `research/README.md` correction 13 and `research/state-2026-09.md` §(g).
- 🟡 Author's knowledge base, module 14 §14.18 V14.3: the failure record behind the timeline figure, including Orthogonal and Auros in 2022, the City of Detroit suit against RealT's LLCs from 2024, the RealT liquidation of 2 Jul 2026, and the USDM wind-down of 12 May to 22 Aug 2025.

## Caveats

The whole diagnosis of wave one's secondary market rests on one aggregator, Security Token Market, which is the only source that published these statistics systematically between 2019 and 2021. No independent confirmation of those volumes exists. The direction agrees with everything else known about the period, and the dependence on a single data provider has to be stated.

The issuance figures are secondary. They are PwC's, cited by LCX, and the original report could not be located. They also carry an unresolved disagreement: the same tables that report 28 offerings for 2018 appear elsewhere as 35 offerings for the same 442 mn USD. This chapter uses 28, the figure with a named source, and does not average the two.

The real size of external capital in the wave's largest raise is not established. tZERO's 134 mn USD includes 30 mn USD of intercompany debt settlement, and a separate GSR Capital transaction reported alongside it, a 30 mn USD token purchase from Overstock and a 270 mn USD equity investment, was never publicly confirmed to have closed. No total for outside money is stated here.

How many of the 2018 and 2019 STO issuers still exist in 2026 has never been counted publicly. The known survivors are infrastructure vendors, Securitize, tZERO, Polymath in its Polymesh form, and Templum, rather than the offerings themselves, which is not a substitute for a survival rate.

Default amounts in wave two are orders of magnitude rather than audited figures. Different sources draw the boundary differently on recoveries and restructurings, and the Maple and Goldfinch numbers here come from a single secondary research note.

Maple's reported figures after May 2024, no credit losses and about 2 bn USD locked, come from that same note rather than from an audit, and the note's publisher operates in the same market.

Canton's share of represented value is the largest hole in the wave-four picture. The figure comes from an aggregator relaying RWA.xyz, and a research pass on 10 September 2026 failed to reproduce it from either RWA.xyz or DefiLlama. It appears in a table with that flag and carries no weight in the argument.

The March and June 2026 distributed and represented readings come from two different sources with two different methodologies, and RWA.xyz changed its taxonomy twice in the period, on 21 November 2025 and 17 March 2026. Apparent jumps in these series can be reclassification rather than movements of capital.

The FOBXX first-mover claim and the fund's own prospectus do not agree about how much of the share register lives on a public chain, and neither reading is dropped.

The four-wave division is the author's framing rather than a classification anyone else maintains, and the boundary dates overlap: FOBXX in April 2021 sits inside wave two by date and inside wave three by significance.