Product presets compared — same $ amount
Same investment amount, three representative wrapper-risk profiles. Institutional-grade custody tends to have lower exploit odds but higher minimums and more redemption gating; open-access on-chain versions trade some custody rigor for 24/7 transferability.
| Product profile | Risk-adj. yield | vs T-bill ETF | $/yr expected |
|---|
The wrapper isn't the Treasury — price them separately
Marketing for tokenized Treasury products leans hard on "backed by US Treasuries" — true, and it's why the base yield is near risk-free. But you never hold the Treasury directly. You hold a token issued by a company, backed by Treasuries a custodian actually possesses, redeemable through a process that company controls. Each of those is a separate point of failure a T-bill ETF at a regulated brokerage doesn't have: no smart contract to exploit, no bridge, no issuer-controlled redemption queue. See stablecoin vault risk for the equivalent math on crypto-native yield sources rather than tokenized TradFi assets.
The composability premium is a separate trade from the yield trade
The honest reason to hold a tokenized Treasury over a T-bill ETF is rarely "it yields more" — priced correctly, it usually doesn't, once custodian and redemption risk are subtracted. The real reason is that the token moves like any other on-chain asset: it settles in seconds instead of T+1/T+2, it's usable as collateral in a DeFi lending market or margin position without ever leaving the chain, and it doesn't need a brokerage account or market hours. That's a genuine utility premium for someone who's already operating on-chain and wants idle stablecoin balances doing something better than sitting at 0% — but it's a liquidity/composability premium, not a yield premium, and this calculator's "vs T-bill ETF" column is built specifically to stop the two from being silently bundled into one marketing number.
Redemption friction is the risk most first-time buyers miss entirely. Some products settle same-day for large qualified holders; others impose a multi-day cutoff, a KYC/whitelist gate, or — for newly minted tokens on certain issuers — a lockup window before the token is even transferable. None of that matters in calm markets. It matters enormously during a stress event, when everyone wants to exit at once and the official redemption path becomes the bottleneck — exactly the scenario where you'd actually need the cash fast and would instead be forced to sell on a secondary market at whatever discount buyers demand for taking your place in the queue.