For most of the past decade, Web3 and Wall Street seemed to be building different financial systems. Banks worked through regulated intermediaries, brokerage accounts and fixed settlement windows. Crypto built open networks where assets could move around the clock.
That split is fading. Banks and asset managers are putting funds and securities on public blockchains, while crypto firms are learning how to work with custody, securities rules and real-world ownership. Proof of Talk and INPUT Global reviewed more than 200 startups that applied to Proof of Pitch between January and May 2026. RWA and tokenization made up 29% of the group, ahead of DeFi at 23%.
The clearest example may be BlackRock. Its path into Web3 shows how tokenization can grow from a single product into a wider financial system.
BlackRock Started With a Fund
BlackRock launched BUIDL, its first tokenized fund on a public blockchain, in March 2024 with Securitize. The fund invests in cash, U.S. Treasury bills and repurchase agreements and gives qualified investors a tokenized share of the fund. Ownership is recorded onchain, investors receive daily accrued dividends, and shares can move peer to peer around the clock.
The first version launched on Ethereum. By March 2025, BUIDL had passed $1 billion in assets and was available across Ethereum, Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, Polygon and Solana. BNB Chain followed later that year. Wormhole supports transfers between several of those networks, while BNY Mellon serves as cash and securities custodian.
There is a useful lesson in how BlackRock approached this. It did not need to rebuild asset management from scratch. BlackRock still manages the fund, BNY Mellon still handles custody, and Securitize handles much of the tokenization and transfer-agent infrastructure. Blockchain changes how the fund can be held, moved and connected to other financial products.
BlackRock also put capital behind that infrastructure. In May 2024, it led a $47 million strategic funding round in Securitize, and BlackRock executive Joseph Chalom joined Securitize's board. The relationship went beyond hiring a vendor to tokenize one fund. BlackRock gained a direct seat in a company building the rails for tokenized funds and securities.
That makes BUIDL more useful as a case study. The product came first. Distribution, liquidity and new uses followed.
Then BUIDL Started Connecting to Crypto Markets
Soon after BUIDL launched, Circle built a smart contract that lets eligible holders exchange BUIDL shares for USDC. A fund share earning Treasury yield could now move into digital dollars around the clock without waiting for a normal bank settlement window.
The next step was collateral.
In 2025, Crypto.com and Deribit began accepting BUIDL as collateral for qualified users. Binance later added BUIDL as off-exchange collateral, allowing institutional clients to keep exposure to the Treasury fund while using that value to support trading positions.
By April 2026, BlackRock, OKX and Standard Chartered had built another version of the same model. Eligible OKX clients can use BUIDL as trading collateral while the asset remains in regulated off-exchange custody at Standard Chartered. The Treasury position keeps earning yield while it also supports activity elsewhere.
BUIDL has also moved closer to DeFi. In February 2026, Securitize and Uniswap Labs added a route for eligible BUIDL investors to trade through UniswapX. Trades use an RFQ system with approved market participants and settle onchain through smart contracts.
The fund did not change from one example to the next. Its job did.
It began as tokenized access to a BlackRock money-market-style product. It then gained stablecoin liquidity, moved across several chains, became trading collateral and gained an onchain trading route. Each connection gave the same underlying fund another use.
That is a more useful way to read BlackRock's Web3 push than counting how many assets it has tokenized.
BlackRock Is Building Distribution Around the Asset
Larry Fink has been open about the direction. In his 2025 chairman's letter, he wrote that stocks, bonds and funds can all be tokenized, pointing to faster settlement and fractional ownership as possible gains.
BUIDL shows what that view looks like in practice. BlackRock supplies the financial product and investment management. A network of other firms makes that product usable across onchain markets.
That network changes the economics of distribution. A traditional fund usually reaches the investor through a chain of fund platforms, banks or brokers. A tokenized fund can also sit inside wallets, exchanges and smart-contract systems, subject to the rules that apply to the product and investor.
For a firm that already manages trillions of dollars, this gives existing products new places to go.
Stocks and ETFs Are Following the Same Path
Robinhood offers token products linked to U.S. stocks and ETFs for European users. Ondo has built a large catalog of tokenized stocks and ETFs backed by securities held through traditional market infrastructure. Superstate is working with issuers to put registered shares onchain through its transfer-agent system.
The structures differ, and the rights attached to each product need to be read carefully. The direction is clear enough: public-market exposure is becoming available inside blockchain-based financial systems.
Ondo has already moved from single stocks into strategy products. In March 2026, it brought five Franklin Templeton ETFs onto Ondo Stocks, including active growth, multifactor equity and income strategies. Tokenized SPY and QQQ exposure has also been connected to Morpho lending markets and used in other onchain trading setups.
Once an ETF comes onchain, the object being tokenized already contains portfolio decisions. Someone has chosen the holdings, weights and rebalance method. That brings asset management itself closer to the center of the Web3 product.
Autopilot Shows What Users Want to Buy
Autopilot attacks the same market from the other side.
Instead of starting with blockchain infrastructure, it starts with the person or idea behind the portfolio. Its marketplace includes expert-run portfolios, thematic strategies, hedge-fund trackers based on 13F filings and politician trackers built from public trade disclosures. Users choose a portfolio, connect a brokerage account and let Autopilot mirror the trades inside that account. The company says more than $1 billion has been invested through the platform.
The Pelosi Tracker shows how strong that idea can be. SFGate reported in November 2025 that about 127,000 users had put roughly $531 million into Autopilot's Pelosi portfolio. Users were following trades drawn from mandatory public disclosures associated with Pelosi's household.
The appeal is easy to understand. People already follow Warren Buffett's Berkshire holdings, hedge-fund 13Fs, congressional trades and well-known tech investors. Most retail investors have neither the time nor the tools to collect each filing, work out what changed and keep a brokerage account aligned with it.
Autopilot turns that work into a product.
Users are choosing a source of investment judgment before choosing the individual stocks.
The Leopold Case Shows Why the Rules Matter
Autopilot's Leopold Aschenbrenner tracker gives a better example of the hard part.
Aschenbrenner founded the AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness. Autopilot launched a portfolio based on the fund's public holdings in March 2026. Business Insider reported this week that more than 5,000 investors were still following the tracker after the hedge fund suffered a severe July drawdown. Around $32 million had flowed into the Autopilot strategy since launch.
The Autopilot portfolio did not suffer the same result as the hedge fund. Autopilot users held a long-only version based on public information. They did not carry the fund's leverage, shorts or private positions.
That gap is the heart of public-figure investing.
A 13F filing arrives after the trades took place. Congressional disclosures also come with a delay. Some filings report value ranges instead of exact position sizes. Private holdings may be missing, and derivatives can be hard to reproduce in a simple retail portfolio.
The raw filing is only an input. Someone still has to decide how to turn it into a product.
Should a new position enter the portfolio on the day the filing appears? How should the position be weighted when the filing gives incomplete information? What happens when the public figure uses an option that the product cannot copy? The rules chosen at those points can change the return as much as the source investor's original idea.
The Leopold example makes that visible. Two products can carry the same person's name and end up with very different risk.
Public-Figure Investing Is an Asset-Management Problem
This is where our own focus sits.
We are interested in bringing strategies and public-figure portfolios onchain. That means taking public signals, turning them into a clear set of portfolio rules, and packaging the result into an investable product that can live on blockchain rails.
The work starts well before a token is issued. Source data has to be collected and cleaned. The portfolio needs rules for weights, delays, rebalances, additions and exits. Users need to be able to see what the strategy holds and understand how a new disclosure changes the portfolio.
Autopilot still runs through connected brokerage accounts: the investor owns the stocks in a broker, and Autopilot acts as the strategy and automation layer.
Putting the portfolio itself onchain changes the product shape. Instead of every user maintaining a separately mirrored brokerage account, a strategy can be represented through an investable onchain vehicle, subject to the legal structure and access rules used for that product. The strategy can then connect to wallets and other onchain markets in the same way BUIDL has begun connecting to exchanges, collateral systems and DeFi.
That connection is where the BlackRock and Autopilot stories meet.
BlackRock shows how an asset manager can take a regulated investment product and give it onchain distribution and utility. Autopilot shows that users want portfolios built around a person, a signal or a clear set of rules.
The Asset Manager Can Be Built Onchain From the Start
BlackRock had to connect an existing asset-management business to blockchain infrastructure. A Web3-native asset manager starts with that infrastructure already available.
Once the portfolio exists, it can plug into wallet distribution or other financial apps. As the product grows, custody, reporting, collateral use and secondary liquidity can be added around it.
The product range can grow as well. A well-known investor's disclosed holdings may support one portfolio. Another strategy may come from a fund manager or a factor model; others can be built around research-driven themes. Each product has its own data and rules, while the same asset-management and onchain infrastructure can support the wider range.
As tokenized stocks and ETFs become easier to issue, creating the wrapper gets cheaper. The firms that matter will be the ones that know what to put inside it.