Yield is money you earn for letting someone else use your money. When you put $1,000 in a savings account and earn $10 in interest over the year, that $10 is yield — 1% yield. When you buy a Treasury bill and earn $48 in interest over a year, that $48 is yield — 4.8% yield. Some blockchain tokens pay you just for holding them. That is also yield — and it is the mechanism that makes real-world asset (RWA) tokens genuinely useful rather than just speculative.
The difference between a speculative crypto token and an RWA token is often yield. A speculative token goes up or down based on sentiment and market demand. An RWA token backed by a Treasury bill goes up as the underlying Treasury bill accrues interest — you earn yield just for holding it, independent of what the market thinks about blockchain.
Types of Yield in the RWA World
Interest yield is the simplest. You hold a tokenized bond or Treasury bill. The US government (or corporate borrower) pays interest on the underlying debt instrument. That interest flows through to you as the token holder. BlackRock's BUIDL fund currently pays approximately 4.8% annually — every day, your token balance accrues a fraction of that annual rate.
Rental yield is the real estate equivalent. You hold a tokenized share of a rental property. Tenants pay rent. After expenses (property management, maintenance, insurance), the net rental income flows to token holders. Platforms like RealT distribute rental income in stablecoins directly to token holders' wallets every week.
Lending yield comes from lending your tokens to borrowers. DeFi lending protocols like Aave and Compound allow you to deposit tokenized assets and earn interest from borrowers who pay to access the liquidity. The yield fluctuates with supply and demand — when more people want to borrow, the rate goes up; when fewer people borrow, it goes down.
Liquidity provider yield is more complex. When you deposit tokens into an automated market maker (AMM) pool, you earn a portion of every trading fee that passes through that pool. This can be high when trading volume is high, and it comes with a risk called impermanent loss — if the price ratio of the tokens in the pool changes significantly, you may end up with less value than if you had simply held the tokens.
The Yield Gap That Started the RWA Boom
The US Federal Reserve raised interest rates from near zero to 5.25-5.5% between 2022 and 2024. Treasury bills — the shortest-duration US government debt — were suddenly paying 4-5% annually. Bank savings accounts were paying 0.5-1%. The gap between what you could earn in a tokenized Treasury product and what your bank was paying you became obvious and enormous.
That gap is the single biggest reason institutional money flooded into tokenized Treasuries in 2023-2026. A $100 million institutional cash position earning 0.5% in a bank account was leaving $4.5 million per year on the table compared to a tokenized Treasury product. Moving that money on-chain — with the settlement efficiency, transparency, and composability of blockchain — became an easy decision for institutions that had the infrastructure to do it.
→ 0.5% vs 4.8% — the full story of the yield gap
→ Private credit yield — 8-15% and why it is the biggest RWA category
→ How to evaluate an RWA project — is the yield real?