Who Holds Tokenized Treasuries, and How Access Shapes It

Tokenized treasuries are held by two very different kinds of investor: open-access funds reachable by ordinary onchain wallets, which can accumulate thousands of holders, and permissioned institutional funds sold to a short list of eligible allocators, which often hold dozens of wallets or fewer. The holder count tells you the access model of the fund, not how much money is in it.

Here is the sharpest illustration. Ondo U.S. Dollar Yield (USDY) and BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity (BUIDL) are within roughly 5% of each other on onchain size, yet one has thousands of holders and the other has dozens (Allium data, October 12, 2026). Same scale, almost opposite distribution. The reason is who is allowed in.

Key takeaways

• Holder count on a tokenized treasury fund is primarily a function of access type. Open, retail-reachable products spread across thousands of wallets; permissioned institutional products concentrate in a handful of eligible entities.
• Two funds of nearly identical onchain size, Ondo USDY at $2.32B and BlackRock BUIDL at $2.20B, carry 8,217 and 55 holders respectively (Allium data, October 12, 2026).
• Low holder counts on permissioned institutional funds are a feature. Eligibility rules (KYC, qualified-purchaser or institutional-only status, transfer whitelists) are doing exactly what they were designed to do.
• Holders are onchain wallet addresses, not necessarily unique people or firms. One institution can custody many wallets, and one wallet can represent a pooled position.
• The number you want to read next to any holder count is the fund's access model, because without it the count is easy to misread.

Why it matters now

As more treasury products move onchain, holder counts are becoming a headline metric, and they are easy to misread. A fund with four wallets and a fund with eight thousand are not competing on the same field, and treating one count as weak and the other as strong misses what the numbers actually describe. The whole tokenized treasury and onchain money-market segment sat at $16.17B across 91 assets and 36 issuers (Allium data, October 12, 2026). Sort that universe by holders and a clean pattern appears: the funds built to be reachable by any compliant wallet sit at the top of the holder distribution, and the funds built for a named set of institutions sit at the bottom, regardless of how large either group is.

The same size, a different crowd

Allium data, October 12, 2026. Market cap is onchain token market cap, not fund AUM; the two can differ.

Read the two columns together and the single-digit counts stop looking surprising. A fund sold to a short, named set of institutional allocators behind eligibility screens is supposed to show a small number of wallets. The Galaxy State Street Sweep Fund at 5 eligibility-restricted holders and JPMorgan's liquidity token at 4 eligibility-restricted holders are doing precisely what an eligibility-restricted institutional product is built to do. The small number is the design working, not a signal about demand or quality.

Why open-access funds climb into the thousands

Ondo's USDY is structured so that any compliant, non-US wallet can hold the token after onboarding, and it moves on public chains like any other token once issued. BlackRock's BUIDL, by contrast, operates a transfer whitelist: tokens can only move between addresses that have passed eligibility checks, and the fund is marketed to qualified institutional investors. You can read the mechanics on Ondo's own site and Securitize, the transfer agent and platform behind BUIDL. That one architectural choice, an open mint versus a whitelist, is what separates 8,217 wallets from 55.

Spiko's funds show the same force inside a single issuer. Its euro overnight fund reaches 9,054 holders and its EU T-bills fund 1,762, because Spiko distributes to a broad base of businesses and individuals across Europe. Franklin Templeton shows the opposite spread within its own lineup: the retail-reachable OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund has 1,006 holders while its permissioned institutional liquidity fund has 43. The issuer is the same. The distribution channel is not.

What a "holder" actually counts

A holder here is an onchain address holding the token, which is not the same as a unique investor. Three caveats matter when you quote these numbers:

• One institution can run many wallets. A treasury desk might split a position across several addresses for operational or custody reasons, inflating the count relative to the number of real entities.
• One wallet can pool many beneficiaries. A custodian or an omnibus account can hold a single onchain position on behalf of hundreds of underlying clients, deflating the count relative to the number of real beneficiaries.
• Whitelisted funds cap the universe by rule. For a permissioned fund, the holder count can never exceed the number of approved addresses, so comparing it to an open fund is comparing two different populations.

None of this makes the number useless. It makes the number readable only alongside the access model. For background on how these instruments are built, see how tokenized treasuries work, and for the custody and settlement plumbing that governs who can hold what, see the role of a central securities depository for tokenized securities.

Reading holders across chains, consistently

Counting holders sounds trivial until you try to do it across the whole segment. The same fund can be issued on several chains, a transfer on Ethereum and a transfer on Solana are encoded in completely different ways, and an institutional whitelist movement and a retail mint look nothing alike at the raw-log level. To state that USDY has 8,217 holders and BUIDL has 55 in the same table, each address on each chain has to resolve to the same fields: asset, issuer, chain, holder address, balance and token market cap, with permissioned transfers distinguished from open ones. Allium normalizes those records across 150+ chains into standardized RWA tables, which is what makes a like-for-like holder count across issuers and chains possible. The underlying schemas sit in these RWA datasets.

The practical takeaway is simple. When you see a tokenized treasury holder count, ask what the fund lets a wallet do before you ask what the number means. An open fund with thousands of holders and a permissioned fund with a handful are not competing on the same field, and the gap between them measures access, not appetite.

Frequently asked questions

Why does BlackRock's BUIDL have so few holders compared to Ondo's USDY?

BUIDL is a permissioned institutional fund with a transfer whitelist, so only eligibility-approved addresses can hold it, and it is marketed to qualified institutional investors. Ondo's USDY is open to any compliant wallet after onboarding. The result is 55 holders versus 8,217 at similar onchain size (Allium data, October 12, 2026). The gap reflects access model, not demand.

Does a low holder count mean a tokenized treasury fund is failing?

No. For permissioned, eligibility-restricted institutional funds, a small holder count is the intended design. Those products are sold to a short list of approved allocators, so a handful of wallets is normal and says nothing about the size, performance or success of the fund.

Is a holder the same as a unique investor?

Not exactly. A holder is an onchain address. A single institution can spread a position across multiple addresses, and a single custodial or omnibus wallet can represent many underlying clients. Treat the holder count as a measure of onchain addresses, interpreted alongside the fund's access model.

What is the difference between onchain market cap and fund AUM?

Onchain market cap is the value of tokens issued and circulating on public chains. Fund AUM is the total assets the fund manages, which can include holdings not represented onchain. They can differ, so the figures here are onchain token market cap, not AUM.

Which issuers have the most widely distributed tokenized treasury holders?

Open-access and retail-reachable products lead on holder count. As of Allium data from October 12, 2026, Spiko's euro overnight fund (9,054) and Ondo's USDY (8,217) sit at the top, followed by Spiko's EU T-bills fund and Franklin Templeton's retail-reachable government money fund. These are distributed to broad investor bases rather than a closed institutional list.

How are tokenized treasury holder counts measured across different blockchains?

Each chain encodes balances and transfers differently, so raw data has to be normalized into consistent fields (asset, issuer, chain, holder address, balance, market cap) before counts are comparable. Allium standardizes this across 150+ chains, which allows holder counts to be compared like-for-like between issuers and networks.

Interested in learning more about Allium’s RWA data? Speak to someone on the team.

Allium provides onchain data infrastructure. Companies named in this article may be Allium customers, prospects or commercial counterparties. The authors and other Allium personnel may hold positions in the assets discussed. This article is informational only and is not investment, legal or tax advice. Data and information last reviewed: October 12, 2026.