Who runs each layer of an RWA product

The map by layer

Nine layers hold the firms this series names. The map is a reading aid, not a census: RWA.xyz counted 98 asset-manager entities on 28 August 2026 and 207 tokenization platforms on 3 September 2026, of which 196 were distributed and 23 represented. What follows is the subset the rest of the course already uses.

Asset managers. BlackRock runs BUIDL and, in a different legal wrapper, OnChain Shares of the BlackRock Liquidity Funds, with BNY Mellon as transfer agent in the latter. Franklin Templeton runs BENJI and FOBXX, live since 6 April 2021. Apollo's tokenized feeder ACRED held about 115 mn USD in mid-2026 against the manager's own 700 to 840 bn USD of assets, 0.014% of the business. Hamilton Lane appears as HLSCOPE. WisdomTree Connect held 13 tokenized funds by April 2025. Ondo runs OUSG and USDY and, from 2026, tokenized stocks. Superstate runs USTB. The giants are distributing a business they already had. The independents are trying to become a business on the fee the giants charge as a rounding error.

Platforms and transfer agents. Securitize bundles four regulated roles in one group: an SEC-registered broker-dealer, a digital transfer agent, a fund administrator and a regulated ATS operator, and went public in July 2026 at about a 1.25 bn USD valuation. Tokeny, founded in October 2017 in Luxembourg, built the T-REX protocol later standardised as ERC-3643 and holds no financial-services licence of its own; the issuer-client keeps that relationship. Apex Group took a majority stake in Tokeny in May 2025. DigiFT is MAS-licensed, from December 2023, as a Recognised Market Operator for on-chain RWA trading, and on 10 September 2026 RWA.xyz recorded 101.92 mn USD of distributed value across two tracked assets, 54 holders and four monthly active addresses.

Custody. Anchorage Digital is the first federally chartered US digital-asset bank and the firm that took over Mountain Protocol and wound USDM down. BitGo listed on the NYSE as BTGO in January 2026. Fireblocks is MPC infrastructure, "not a custodian" by default, with a separate NYDFS-chartered trust subsidiary since August 2024. Copper became an SEC-registered broker-dealer in August 2026 after withdrawing a UK FCA application in December 2024.

Oracles, venues, credit, commodities, equities, networks. Those six layers get their own sections below, because the differences inside each layer are the content. Aave Horizon is the only RWA-collateral market at measurable scale, treated fully in chapter 8. Maple survived by adding overcollateralization. Centrifuge's CFG holders receive 0 USD of protocol fees. Figure's gain-on-sale dwarfs every pure-play tokenizer. Paxos and Tether dominate tokenized gold under two different regulators. Backed cannot serve US or UK persons. Canton explains most of the represented category on its own. Kinexys by J.P. Morgan is a closed deposit-token system.

Marginal cost near zero for giants, negative economics for everyone else

Securitize, the only pure-play tokenizer with public reporting duties, posted 14.4 mn USD of revenue and a 21.7 mn USD net loss in the second quarter of 2026, on transaction volume that rose 147% to 5.3 bn USD (Form 8-K, 12 August 2026). Figure Technology Solutions, in the same quarter, reported 57.57 mn USD of gain-on-sale alone, and its financials contain no "tokenization revenue" line (earnings release, 13 August 2026). Attention sits on the tokenizer. The margin sits on the lender that happens to register loans on a chain.

The arithmetic that produces this split is the break-even treated in chapter 4. The knowledge base's undivided 435,000 USD of annual cost implies about 87 mn USD of assets at 50 bps and about 290 mn USD at 15 bps. BUIDL at 50 bps and 2.8 bn USD of assets, a July 2026 reading via MetaMask citing RWA.xyz, earns 14.0 mn USD a year at a marginal cost close to zero for a firm that already runs Treasury infrastructure. The same issuer runs USTB at 15 bps and USCC at 75 bps on identical legal and technical rails. In the 15 to 20 bps band that the Treasury market actually charges, an independent issuer does not exist economically.

Headline management fee is not the product's cost. USCC states 75 bps. BUIDL's Ethereum class states 50. OUSG is about 35 all in, 15 to Ondo plus 20 through BUIDL. USDY states 25, BENJI 20, USTB 15. USYC states 0% management and 10% performance, which at a 3.21% seven-day net APY on 3 September 2026 is about 35.7 bps gross. PAXG states 0 storage and collects on creation. Two of the eight collect somewhere other than the line named "management fee".

The transfer agent's register beats the smart contract's state

A take rate is the share of the fees flowing through a protocol that the protocol keeps, as against the fees themselves. Centrifuge keeps 32 bps of TVL at a 9.1% take rate on a September 2026 DefiLlama reading. The more important split in this layer is legal, not commercial.

Steakhouse Financial's analysis of BUIDL's Offering Memorandum, April 2024, states that the register of members kept by the transfer agent governs legal ownership of the shares in all circumstances, and that where the register and the chain disagree, the register binds. Securitize's own SEC filings describe using a public blockchain as the master securityholder file, with balances and KYC status on-chain and personal data off-chain (Forms S-1 and 424B3, 2026). The legally binding register is the whole of that construction, because the chain does not contain the holder's identity. Reconstruction after a technical failure or a contract bug runs from the transfer agent's register, which is the reverse of the instinct that the chain is the source of truth.

A newer generation of products describes the same arrangement in the opposite language. In the OnChain Shares class of the BlackRock Liquidity Funds, BNY Mellon Investment Servicing keeps the official record of ownership on a public blockchain, and the chain records plus an off-chain identity map govern registered ownership, with a technical-failure exception (Form 485APOS, 8 May 2026). The same manager runs BlackRock Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle, where Securitize Transfer Agent, LLC keeps the official record in a permissioned system tied to Ethereum, Tempo and Solana (prospectus, 8 May 2026). One manager, two transfer agents, two register architectures. The legal layer of the product belongs to the transfer agent. Sales materials name the issuer.

The SEC's Division of Investment Management issued a no-action letter on 12 August 2026 relieving registered Franklin funds from part of Rule 17f-2 for FOBXX under twelve conditions. Staff reasoning rests on the transfer agent FTIS keeping unilateral control of the official ownership record.

Chapter 5 reads the powers those transfer agents need in the contract. This chapter only needs the consequence: a product built to be legal has to carry a backdoor, and the backdoor's owner is a licensed firm, not a protocol.

RedStone: origin, funding, product line, and what it actually powers

RedStone is an oracle: a service that writes off-chain numbers into a chain so a contract can read them. The rest of this series meets it as the firm that carries NAV for Securitize's funds. The profile below is what that one-line description leaves out.

Sources disagree on the founding year. DL News, 9 July 2025, describes a company conceived in late 2020 by Jakub Wojciechowski and Marcin Kazmierczak, with Warsaw roots. The Block, 2 July 2024, describes a Switzerland-based firm founded in 2020 during Arweave's incubation. RedStone's own Series A post dates a 2021 launch and a January 2023 mainnet. The team's own page names Wojciechowski as founder, Kazmierczak and Alex Suvorov as co-founders, and does not state a headquarters. Secondary sources place the operating office in Baar, Switzerland; a Swiss registry record was not located for this series. Record the founding as conceived late 2020, launched 2021, mainnet January 2023, and the Warsaw and Baar accounts as reported, not as a confirmed registration.

Funding that is confirmed: a 7 mn USD seed on 30 August 2022 led by Lemniscap, and a 15 mn USD Series A announced 2 July 2024 led by Arrington Capital. A SAFT, a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens, is the structure of that round: a right to tokens, not equity. RedStone's own post says about 22 mn USD total; The Block says about 23 mn USD. A 525,000 USD pre-seed in July 2021 and a 350,000 USD angel round in April or May 2023 appear only in an unattributed summary and are not folded into either total.

The RED token's tokenomics were published on 12 February 2025, with a maximum supply of 1,000,000,000. Binance Launchpool farming began on 26 February 2025 and spot listing on 6 March 2025. RED is stakeable via RedStone's EigenLayer Actively Validated Service. Governance rights are not described in the docs or the tokenomics post.

The product line, from RedStone's own docs, treats push and pull as first-class models. In push, permissionless relayers submit signed data on-chain when a heartbeat or a deviation threshold is met. In pull, the user appends a signed package to calldata and pays the gas. RedStone's 30 March 2026 comparison post claims it is "the only provider to offer both models cross-chain", which is a company claim. Every Securitize NAV feed in the public relayer manifests is a push feed.

RWA products named in those docs and posts: TSSO, announced 1 July 2025, a signed NAV payload for assets with no continuous market price; Proof of Reserve; Settle, launched 28 April 2026, a KYC'd solver auction running from 300 milliseconds to minutes, with atomic executor settlement; Bolt, Atom, Live, HyperStone. Settle's first live asset was Midas's mGLOBAL via Symbiotic. A Centrifuge and NYLIM HYB integration was announced on 1 September 2026 with a Morpho vault "set to launch soon". No settlement volume is disclosed anywhere. RedStone's product page says "$30B+" of tokenized RWAs on-chain; Cointelegraph's paraphrase added the word "idle". This chapter uses the product page.

Securitize named RedStone its primary oracle partner on 12 March 2025. Under TSSO, RedStone publishes daily NAV feeds, 24-hour heartbeat, 0.01% deviation override, for BUIDL, ACRED, HLSCOPE, VBILL, STAC, BRSRV and HINC, with named contracts in the public manifests. Securitize's S-4/A amendments of April and May 2026 name both RedStone and Chronicle; the 7 August 2026 424B3 names neither. Chronicle supplies Proof of Asset for BUIDL and STAC as of March 2026. RedStone remains the firm Securitize calls primary.

Total value secured, written TVS, is the value of positions that depend on an oracle's feeds. Total value locked, written TVL, is the value sitting in a protocol's contracts, a different count. RedStone's own claims range from "6B+" in June and August 2026 posts to "10B+" on 30 March 2026. DefiLlama showed 4.138 bn USD on 10 September 2026. Different methods, both recorded, never averaged. A public price list does not exist: redstone.finance/pricing returned 404 on 10 September 2026.

Acquisitions with undisclosed terms: Credora, announced 4 September 2025, rebranded Credora by RedStone; Security Token Market and the TokenizeThis conference, announced 21 January 2026.

On 30 August 2026 Tectonic on Cronos lost about 75 mn USD after TONIC's price rose roughly 100 times in 20 minutes. RedStone's co-founder stated publicly that "the oracle wasn't wrong" and "accurately reported the price of TONIC on the pool it was reading from at that moment". That is a company statement about its own product. No counter-statement from Tectonic was found. No confirmed RedStone-caused outage or mispricing was found for June to September 2026 either; the dedicated search could not be completed, so the correct sentence is that no public report was found, which is an absence of evidence.

Chainlink and the rest of the oracle layer

Chainlink is the other name that appears wherever this series discusses data. Its current docs organise the RWA side as SmartData, three feed types: Proof of Reserve, NAVLink and SmartAUM. CCIP reached general availability on 24 April 2024. ACE, the Automated Compliance Engine, was "early access" in a 30 June 2025 post and "Private Beta" in the docs on 10 September 2026. The Digital Transfer Agent technical standard launched on 30 September 2025 with UBS Asset Management as first adopter. SCALE, still active in 2026 with Unichain and MegaETH added in the first quarter, has chains cover Chainlink's operating costs so issuers and dApps typically do not pay directly. No public per-feed price for NAVLink, Proof of Reserve or SCALE was found.

Named RWA clients with dates: Aave Horizon prices Securitize funds via NAVLink, VanEck's VBILL among the first qualifying collateral; Superstate integrated Data Feeds for USTB on 12 August 2024, with Proof of Reserve described then as coming later and not confirmed live by this series; Fidelity International's FILQ launched 13 May 2026 with Sygnum and Chainlink; Kinexys, Ondo and Chainlink settled a cross-chain delivery-versus-payment test on 14 May 2025. Backed has Proof of Reserve active; the page date was not captured.

Pyth extends a first-party pull model into equities, FX and commodities and partnered with the US Department of Commerce in August 2025. It is not a NAV specialist in this material. Chronicle spun out of MakerDAO, now Sky, runs the Scribe mechanism, and verifies BUIDL and STAC as Proof of Asset. Superstate uses Chronicle's Verified Asset Oracle for USTB, and crypto.news separately reports a Chainlink integration for the same fund. Both reports stand; they are not averaged into one provider.

RedStone's 30 March 2026 comparison post claims "zero mispricing events" for itself against named incidents at Chainlink and Pyth. Those competitor claims appear only in that post and are not independently verified here.

Failure modes: wind-down, not hacks, is what actually happens

The list of defaults and closures in this record splits into four categories: credit risk, operational and legal risk, the issuer's decision to end the product, and a liquidity crash of the token. The smart-contract-hack category is empty. Unsecured on-chain credit failed in every case in which it was tried. Product wind-down is the most common ending.

Mountain Protocol's USDM had about 10,820 holders and a cap under 50 mn USD when Anchorage acquired it and wound it down in three phases between 12 May and 22 August 2025, swapping collateral from Treasury bills to USDC in a Uniswap pool. No default, no hack: a business decision. Goldfinch voted to wind down in June 2026 with 56.15 mn USD of unpaid principal. RealT announced liquidation on 2 July 2026 after raising about 140 mn USD from 14,000 to 22,000 investors; escrow was about 640,000 USD, 29 to 46 USD per investor, and the court-appointed trustee's first interventions cost 178,000 USD in two months.

A fee switch is a governance vote that would start paying protocol fees to token holders. Centrifuge keeps 5.21 mn USD a year in fees and pays CFG holders 0 USD because the vote failed on quorum. ONDO's 1.81 bn USD market cap is 29.6 times its annualized 61.2 mn USD of business revenue, with no contractual right to that revenue. Token governance carries no claim on protocol revenue. The sector grew about sixfold from early 2025 while six of the seven largest RWA tokens returned between −44.7% and −98.8% from January 2025 to March 2026. That is correct pricing of a claim that does not exist, not an anomaly.

Distribution concentration is extreme at every level already priced in chapter 4: ten assets are 76.6% of tokenized-stock volume, over 70% of open interest sits on two venues, about 60% of centralized-exchange RWA volume runs through one venue. Aave Horizon in July 2026 held 539.8 mn USD of deposits and 163.5 mn USD borrowed, 30.3% utilization, 0.43% of the distributed market. All ten wrapped xStock tokens on Hyperliquid had zero 24-hour volume and no established mid-price on 12 August 2026.

Paxos Trust Company is an NYDFS limited-purpose trust company, 2015 charter, holding client assets in trust off its own balance sheet. PAXG and XAUT, 71% to 90% of a 5.14 bn USD tokenized-gold category, sit under New York state and El Salvador's CNAD respectively, and look identical in category statistics.