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TL;DR
- More than $38 billion in tokenized real-world assets now sit on public blockchains, including Treasury funds, gold, and stocks. That's over three times the total in mid-2025.
- Spending them is still slow. Users have to sell, swap into a stablecoin, and move the funds before they can pay, and they stop earning yield the moment they sell.
- Reap's Virtual Assets closes that gap. If a platform can define an asset and give it a price, its users can spend that asset on a card.
- The platform keeps custody, sets the price feed, and keeps the collateral account funded. Reap authorizes each transaction and settles it with the card network.
- RWA-backed card spend is still early. The open questions are liquidity, pricing, and regulation, and they sit on the asset side, not the card side.
Treasuries, gold, and stocks now live on-chain. What's still missing is a way to spend them at the checkout counter, and the card infrastructure for that already exists.
Tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) are traditional assets, such as Treasuries, gold, and stocks, issued as tokens on a blockchain. They are one of the fastest-growing corners of crypto. According to RWA.xyz, more than $38 billion in tokenized real-world assets now sit on public blockchains, held by over 5 million addresses. That's more than three times the roughly $11.8 billion recorded in mid-2025.
The mix keeps widening. Tokenized U.S. Treasury funds and money market funds are still the biggest category, with products like Circle's USYC, Ondo's USDY, and BlackRock's BUIDL each holding over $2 billion. Tokenized gold, such as Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG), is close behind. Tokenized stocks have grown fastest: more than 2,000% in the past year, with over a million active holders.
Most of the RWA conversation so far has been about issuance, trading, and DeFi collateral. A simpler question gets less attention: once a user holds a tokenized asset, can they spend it?
The last mile: holding to spending
Say a user holds a tokenized Treasury fund in their wallet. It earns yield, settles on-chain, and moves 24/7, so it's better than a brokerage account in most ways.
Then the user wants to buy dinner, book a flight, or pay a subscription. Today that usually means:
- Redeem or sell the tokenized asset
- Swap the proceeds into a stablecoin
- Off-ramp or move funds to a spending account
- Spend
Every step adds time and cost, and the user stops earning the moment they sell. Tokenization made the asset programmable, but spending it still works like a bank account.
Card rails are the obvious place to fix this. Visa is accepted at over 175 million merchants worldwide. If a tokenized asset can authorize a card transaction directly, it becomes spendable anywhere a card works.
Any asset you can define and price, now spendable
Reap built Virtual Assets, part of Reap's Card Issuing solution, around one rule: if you can define an asset and set its rate, your users can spend it on their card.
Virtual Assets wasn't designed only for RWAs. Our clients use it today for assets like stablecoins, BTC, ETH, yield-bearing tokens, cashback, and loyalty points. But that rule doesn't distinguish between a governance token and a tokenized T-bill. Reap only needs two things from you:
- A definition: a name and a symbol for the asset
- A price: a fixed rate (for stable-value assets) or a price feed you point Reap to (for anything that moves, such as a fund's NAV, a gold price, or a stock price)
Tokenized RWAs meet both. They're discrete, well-defined units, and most already publish a NAV or reference price. So from the card's point of view, a tokenized Treasury fund is just another asset with a price feed.
How it could work in practice
Here's how a platform could make a tokenized asset spendable with Virtual Assets:
1. Define the asset. Register the tokenized asset (say, a tokenized money market fund) with Reap and point Reap at your price feed for its current NAV. Reap polls the feed automatically.
2. Allocate balances. When a user holds that asset on your platform, you tell Reap how much they hold. It shows up as available card balance, alongside any stablecoins, cashback, or other assets you support. The user sees one combined spending limit.
3. The user taps their card. Reap checks their balance, converts at the current rate from your feed, and authorizes the transaction. The user doesn't swap or off-ramp anything themselves.
4. Settle and sync. Card spend settles with Visa from a master collateral account in USDC or USDT, which you keep topped up. After the transaction clears, you update the user's balance on your side, so your platform and the card stay in sync.
In principle, a user can keep holding the asset (and earning yield, where it pays any) right up until they spend.
What this could look like
- A yield app lets users spend against tokenized Treasury holdings. Balances keep accruing until the moment of purchase, valued at the latest NAV.
- A gold-backed wallet lets users spend tokenized gold for everyday purchases, priced against the live gold rate.
- An investment platform lets users spend against a portion of their tokenized stock portfolio, with a buffer set for price movement.
- A multi-asset card combines USDC, a tokenized Treasury fund, and a cashback program into one available balance on one card.
What Reap does, and what you do
Being clear about roles matters most with assets like these.
Reap is not an exchange and doesn't custody or price your users' assets. Virtual Assets is the layer that makes them spendable on a card.
A reality check
We're excited about this, but RWA-backed card spend is still early, and most of the open questions are on the asset side, not the card side:
- Liquidity and redemption. Some tokenized funds redeem on fixed schedules or have minimums. Platforms need enough liquid treasury to back card spend between redemptions.
- Pricing and volatility. A price feed is only as good as its source. Assets that move need sensible buffers so balances don't overstate what's actually spendable.
- Regulation. Tokenized securities are regulated differently across markets. Whether a given asset can be offered for spending depends on the asset, the user, and the jurisdiction.
These are real constraints. But they're the same ones any platform offering RWAs already deals with. The card side doesn't need to be the bottleneck.
Where this is heading
Money is becoming programmable, and the line between "assets you invest" and "money you spend" is getting thinner. Stablecoins showed that on-chain value can be everyday spending money. Tokenized RWAs are next, and when users can spend them as easily as they hold them, they'll feel like money and not just investments.
The infrastructure for that already exists. If you're building with tokenized assets and want to explore what a card could add, talk to our team.
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