Centrifuge to release RWA report on tokenized money market funds’ structural differences

Centrifuge, the onchain asset tokenization platform, is preparing to publish an analysis that digs into how tokenized treasury and money market funds actually differ beneath their seemingly uniform surfaces. The short version: same Treasuries, similar yields, wildly different plumbing.

The report zeroes in on fee structures, redemption timelines, onchain liquidity, and how well these products play with the rest of decentralized finance. For a market segment that has ballooned to roughly $14.2B in onchain assets under management by mid-2026, up approximately 8x from $1.7B in June 2024, the structural fine print matters more than ever.

Same assets, different wrappers

Tokenized treasury funds generally hold the same basket of short-term US government securities, repos, and T-bills. Their yields cluster within a narrow range.

The divergence shows up in everything else. Some funds offer daily liquidity. Others impose redemption constraints that can lock capital for days. Fee structures vary enough to meaningfully eat into returns on what are, by design, low-margin instruments. And when it comes to actually using these tokens inside DeFi protocols, the gap between products becomes a canyon.

Centrifuge’s own flagship offerings illustrate the higher end of what’s possible. The Janus Henderson Anemoy Treasury Fund, trading under JTRSY, tokenizes US T-bills and has crossed $1B in AUM at various points in 2026. Its sibling product, JAAA, runs an AAA CLO strategy. Both operate as BVI professional funds targeting non-US investors and feature onchain NAV reporting, a transparency feature that most traditional fund structures still don’t provide.

The composability problem

One of the more striking data points from the broader tokenization landscape comes from Centrifuge’s Tokenization Outlook 2026, which surveyed 150 operators across the space. The headline finding: 86% of operators said their primary challenge is scaling distribution, not creating new tokenized products.

Pantera’s assessment puts this in sharper relief. Only about 12% of tokenized assets scored highly enough on composability to integrate smoothly with DeFi platforms. That means the vast majority of tokenized funds sit in a kind of limbo: they exist onchain but can’t participate in the ecosystem that gives onchain assets their distinctive utility.

Centrifuge’s own total value locked sat between $1.5B and $1.7B in mid-to-late 2026. The platform’s V3 multichain EVM architecture and partnerships with institutional heavyweights like Janus Henderson and Apollo position it to address some of these composability gaps, but the industry-wide numbers suggest the problem is systemic rather than platform-specific.

Securities classification creates a ceiling

Perhaps the most consequential structural difference between tokenized money market funds and their closest crypto-native cousin, stablecoins, is regulatory classification. Tokenized MMFs are classified as securities. Stablecoins, in most jurisdictions, are not.

JPMorgan published an analysis in May 2026 noting that securities classification imposes transfer restrictions on tokenized MMFs that make seamless circulation fundamentally more difficult than what stablecoins achieve. You can send USDC to any wallet without permission. Try that with a tokenized money market fund share, and you run into KYC gates, transfer agent requirements, and jurisdictional barriers.

This creates an interesting tension. Tokenized treasury funds are increasingly positioned as yield-bearing cash equivalents, essentially stablecoins that pay interest. But the regulatory framework treats them as investment products, not payment instruments. The yield is the feature. The restricted transferability is the cost.

Centrifuge’s upcoming report arrives at a moment when the tokenized fund market has enough scale and variety to make comparative analysis genuinely useful. With $14.2B in AUM and growing, investors can no longer treat these products as interchangeable. The underlying Treasuries might be fungible. The tokenized wrappers around them are decidedly not.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.