RWAToday covers the tokenized asset economy as it exists today — but we also track the industries where real-world asset infrastructure is most needed, most overdue, and most likely to transform. This article is part of that series. The technology described here is not hypothetical. The question is how quickly the industry recognizes the opportunity.
Your bank savings account probably pays somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% annual percentage yield (APY). The Federal Reserve has held its benchmark interest rate between 4.25% and 5.5% for much of the past two years. The US Treasury — the federal government's borrowing arm — pays approximately 4.8% to 5.2% on short-term Treasury bills (T-bills).
The gap between what the Treasury pays and what your bank pays you is not a rounding error. It is a deliberate feature of how the banking system works. And it is the clearest single argument for why tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) matter for people who are not institutional investors, not crypto-native, and not particularly interested in blockchain.
How Your Bank Keeps the Spread
When you deposit money in a savings account, your bank invests it — in Treasury bonds, mortgage-backed securities (MBS), corporate bonds, and other interest-bearing instruments. The bank earns the prevailing market rate on those investments. It pays you a fraction of that rate and keeps the difference as net interest margin (NIM) — one of the primary drivers of bank profitability.
In 2022 and 2023, when the Federal Reserve raised the federal funds rate from near zero to 5.25-5.5% in the most aggressive tightening cycle in four decades, large banks increased their savings account yields by an average of approximately 0.3-0.4 percentage points. Treasury yields increased by approximately 5 percentage points over the same period. The banks captured 4.6 percentage points of the increase as additional margin. Their depositors received about 0.1 percentage points.
This is not fraud. It is the business model of retail banking. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insures your deposits up to $250,000, the bank provides convenience and access, and the spread is the price of that service. Most depositors have accepted this arrangement for their entire lives without considering whether it is the only available option.
What Tokenized Treasuries Offer Instead
A tokenized Treasury product — a blockchain-based instrument that holds US Treasury bills and distributes the yield to token holders — passes the underlying Treasury yield directly to the investor, minus a small management fee. BlackRock's BUIDL fund, the largest tokenized Treasury product, currently yields approximately 4.6-4.8% annually and charges a 0.5% management fee. The net yield to the holder is approximately 4.1-4.3% — versus 0.5% in a typical high-yield savings account at a major bank.
The comparison matters because the underlying credit risk is identical. Both the bank savings account and the tokenized Treasury product are ultimately backed by US government obligations — the savings account indirectly (through the bank's Treasury holdings and FDIC guarantee) and the tokenized product directly (through actual Treasury bill ownership). The risk profile is comparable. The yield differential is the cost of the banking intermediary.
Why Most People Cannot Access Tokenized Treasuries Yet
BUIDL requires a $5 million minimum investment and is available only to qualified purchasers — a legal category under the Investment Company Act of 1940 that requires $5 million or more in investments. This is not a retail product. It is an institutional product that happens to demonstrate the retail argument.
More accessible tokenized Treasury products are emerging. Ondo Finance's OUSG — tokenized short-term US Treasuries — has a $5,000 minimum for accredited investors (individuals with $200,000+ in annual income or $1 million+ in net worth). Superstate's USTB operates similarly. Several money market fund tokenization projects are building toward lower minimums. The trajectory is clear: the minimum accessible amount is falling as the infrastructure matures.
The specific barrier preventing true retail access — anyone with a savings account and $50 — is regulatory rather than technological. US securities law requires either registration (expensive, impractical for small issuances) or exemption (which imposes investor qualification requirements). The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY Act), whose Senate vote occurs September 15, 2026, would begin to create a framework that could make tokenized Treasury products accessible to retail investors. Until that framework exists, the $4+ percentage point yield differential accrues to the banks and institutional investors rather than to ordinary depositors.
The Stablecoin Middle Ground
USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT) — the two largest stablecoins — are themselves backed primarily by US Treasury bills and money market instruments. Their issuers (Circle and Tether, respectively) earn the Treasury yield on the reserve assets. The stablecoin holder earns zero yield — the issuer captures the entire spread. This replicates the bank deposit model exactly: the institution intermediates between Treasury yields and the end holder, capturing the difference.
Yield-bearing stablecoins — which pass some or all of the Treasury yield through to holders — have been growing rapidly but face regulatory uncertainty. The CLARITY Act's provision on stablecoin yield (which would restrict certain yield-bearing structures) is one of the three disputes threatening to sink the bill's September 15 cloture vote.
What This Means for the Average Depositor
The average American household holds approximately $8,000 in savings. At 0.5% APY, that earns $40 per year. At 4.8% — the current T-bill rate — the same $8,000 would earn $384 per year. The difference is $344 annually — not transformative individually, but multiplied across 130 million American households with savings accounts, the aggregate transfer from depositors to bank shareholders is approximately $45 billion per year.
Tokenized Treasury products do not eliminate banks. They create competition. And competition on yield — made possible by the direct-to-holder architecture of blockchain distribution — is the mechanism that most directly translates blockchain infrastructure into consumer benefit for people who have never bought a cryptocurrency.
→ BUIDL: What BlackRock Has Actually Built
→ The 97% Problem: Why US Retail Cannot Access Most of This Yet
→ CLARITY Act September 15 — the legislation that could change this