The US government issues the debt. When that debt moves on-chain, though, Americans are mostly watching from the sidelines.
According to Chainalysis’s 2026 North America report, holders in Italy, Portugal, and Singapore controlled 66.9% of geolocated tokenized US Treasury value as of July 1, 2026. American holders accounted for just 10.5%.
Who owns the on-chain T-bills
Italy leads the pack with 29.9% of geolocated value. Portugal comes next at 18.8%, and Singapore sits close behind at 18.2%.
Japan has more geolocated holders than any other country, at 16.4% of the holder count. Yet those Japanese holders represent only 0.4% of total value. Plenty of wallets, modest balances.
For the uninitiated, a tokenized Treasury is a blockchain-based token that gives the holder exposure to US government debt. Think of it as a digital claim ticket for a bond, one that can sit in a crypto wallet and move around the clock instead of living inside a brokerage statement.
A market that more than doubled
The overall pie is growing fast. Chainalysis puts the total value of tokenized US Treasuries at $15.42 billion, up 125% from $6.86 billion a year earlier.
Tokenized Treasuries now make up 42.8% of the total value of all tokenized real-world assets, or RWAs.
The report highlights two practical reasons foreign investors are leaning in. First, tokenization lowers minimum investment thresholds. Second, it removes the need for overseas investors to open a US brokerage account.
Holding, not lending
Lending activity in tokenized Treasuries fell 23% over the period. That made it the only RWA lending segment to decline. Every other category of tokenized real-world asset lending held up better.
On the product side, BlackRock’s BUIDL fund reclaimed the top spot among tokenized Treasury products in late August 2026.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Kaye Quema. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.