Tokenized Treasuries Hit $14.6 Billion — Here Is Where the Real Capital Allocation Opportunity Sits
The number that caught my attention last month was not $14.6 billion. It was $4.61 trillion.
That is the centralised exchange (CEX) volume figure for March 2025, the lowest monthly reading since late 2024, representing a decline of roughly 11% from the prior period. Put those two data points side by side and you have the beginning of an argument worth taking seriously: capital is not simply contracting across crypto. Some of it is rotating, and it is rotating toward yield.
The $14.6 billion figure comes from CoinDesk's tracking of the tokenized treasury market, which counts on-chain representations of US Treasury instruments, primarily short-duration T-bills and money market equivalents, issued on public and permissioned blockchains. BlackRock's BUIDL fund is the largest single issuer at roughly $2.9 billion. Franklin Templeton's BENJI (formerly FOBXX) sits around $700 million. Ondo Finance's OUSG and its short-duration USDY product together account for over $600 million. Six months ago, the total market was closer to $3 billion. That is not incremental growth. That is a market that has roughly quintupled in under a year.
What is actually driving inflows
The yield story is straightforward, and I want to give you a concrete number to anchor it. As of Q1 2025, tokenized T-bill products were offering annualised yields in the range of 4.5% to 5.1%, depending on the product and the underlying instrument tenor. Comparable prime institutional money market funds in the US were yielding between 4.2% and 4.7%. The differential is not enormous, typically 30 to 60 basis points, but it is positive, and it comes with a structural advantage that the money market fund cannot match: programmability.
A treasury position held in BUIDL or OUSG can be used as collateral in DeFi (decentralised finance) lending protocols, posted against derivative positions, or transferred peer-to-peer without a custodian settlement cycle. For a corporate treasury officer managing short-duration cash