7 Things to Consider When Tokenizing Real World Assets (RWAs) Across Chains

BlackRock launched BUIDL, Franklin Templeton has a tokenized money market fund, Ondo is tokenizing Treasuries, and there are many more examples. The market is approaching $30 billion and accelerating. Most of the conversation focuses on the token, as if minting is the hard part, which it is not. The hard part is everything underneath it.

We see this with our own clients. They'll be interested in tokenizing a RWA on one chain with rich metadata, structured compliance fields, and solid reporting. Then, they contemplate going multi-chain, and the new chain doesn't expose any of the data in the same way.

A RWA onchain requires a full stack. Here's what that looks like.

Legal Wrapper and Custody

Before anything gets tokenized, there has to be a legal entity that owns the asset and a custodian that holds it. The legal structure connects the token to enforceable rights. The custodian makes sure the underlying asset actually exists. Without both, you're just minting a token that points at "something."

Token Standard

Most tokenized RWAs use ERC-20 for fungible assets or ERC-1400 / ERC-3643 for assets that need built-in compliance, transfer restrictions, investor verification, and partition management. We wrote about these ERC token standards in our ERC Token Standards blog post.

Which standard you pick determines what gets enforced at the contract level versus the application level, but it doesn't solve how you track and update the asset data behind the token, especially across chains.

Compliance and Identity

Regulated assets can't trade freely. The contract needs to know who's on the other side of every transfer; KYC, accreditation, jurisdiction, etc. Standards like ERC-3643 handle this at the protocol level. Platforms like Securitize manage it for institutional funds like BUIDL.

Oracles

Oracles connect onchain tokens to off-chain data; NAV updates, interest rates, collateral valuations, reference prices, etc. Chainlink is the most widely integrated. RedStone and Chronicle are gaining traction for RWA-specific feeds.

Issuance

Someone has to create and distribute the tokens. Issuance platforms typically handle minting, investor onboarding, and distribution. Securitize and Tokeny are the biggest names here.

Secondary Markets

Tokenization doesn't mean much if the tokens can't trade. tZERO and INX run regulated alternative trading systems for security tokens. Traditional exchanges are getting involved too. The NYSE signed an MOU with Securitize in March 2026 to build a tokenized securities platform, and the SEC approved Nasdaq's proposal to allow tokenized securities trading alongside traditional equities that same month. DTCC got SEC no-action approval in December 2025 to run a tokenization pilot, partnering with Digital Asset Holdings on the Canton Network.

This layer is likely going to change the most over the next few years.

The Data Layer

Every layer of this stack generates data, transfers, compliance events, NAV updates, holder registries, oracle feeds. If you're tokenizing RWAs, you need data to be well structured and accessible.

The problem is that data availability varies wildly across chains. A purpose-built RWA chain might give you rich asset metadata and standardized reporting out of the box. A general-purpose L2 might give you basic token data and nothing else. The underlying asset information, what actually matters for reporting and compliance, doesn't exist in a consistent format.

We're working through this with clients right now. They need to track the same asset across chains, build consistent reports, and maintain data parity when the source chains aren't giving them the same fields. They need to update token and contract metadata as asset terms change, which means role-based access for who can modify what. The token standard doesn't solve any of that, so we're building the infrastructure that normalizes RWA data across chains so clients have a single source of truth for tracking and reporting regardless of where the token lives.

What This Means

Putting a RWA onchain takes more than a token. It takes a legal wrapper, a custodian, the right token standard, compliance infrastructure, oracles, an issuance platform, secondary markets, and a data layer that actually works across chains.

The part that doesn't get enough attention is that last one, the data layer enabling cross-chain data consistency. The token might be portable and the compliance logic might be embedded, but if the data behind the asset isn't accessible and updatable across every chain the token lives on, the operational overhead transitions from legal into engineering, which is why we're spending a lot of our time working to solve this problem for clients right now.