Why it matters
Net asset value is not an estimate of what a fund is worth. It is a computed number, produced by an administrator under a written valuation policy, audited annually, and given legal force by rules that say dealings must occur at it. Rule 22c-1 under the Investment Company Act requires a registered open-ended fund to sell and redeem shares at the value next computed after an order is received, which is why a mutual fund order placed at eleven in the morning fills at a price struck at four.
Put the same fund on a chain and the token trades whenever someone will trade it. The valuation is discrete and the market is not. That mismatch is the source of nearly every economic question in tokenised funds: what an arbitrageur can extract, what a lending protocol can safely take as collateral, and what an existing holder loses when someone transacts against a figure that is no longer true.
How it works
Three separate operations get conflated under the word pricing.
The first is valuation. An administrator marks the portfolio, deducts liabilities and accruals, and divides by shares outstanding. For a government money market fund constrained by Rule 2a-7 the answer is engineered to be $1.00: the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund reported net asset value per share of $1.00 and total net assets of $843,835,815 for the year ended 31 March 2026. For a credit fund it is a model output. Apollo's Diversified Credit Securitize Fund, launched on 30 January 2025, strikes a daily net asset value and honours redemptions at it through Securitize Markets.
The second is publication. A struck valuation reaches a smart contract only through an oracle. WisdomTree said on 5 November 2025 that the net asset value of its CRDT tokenised private credit fund was being delivered onchain through a decentralised oracle network, with sixteen independent node operators, and the first published figure at $25.70 as of 4 November 2025. Chainlink's own description is precise: valuation feeds are what stop a tokenised fund's minting and redemption logic being exploited.
The third is transaction pricing, where regulators have had to intervene. The SEC's order of 23 February 2026 to WisdomTree Digital Trust granted relief from Section 22(d) and Rule 22c-1, and from Section 17(d) and Rule 17d-1, so covered dealers may buy and sell shares of the WisdomTree Government Money Market Digital Fund on a principal basis at $1.00 per share rather than at the fund's next-calculated net asset value. Forward pricing was set aside for a fund whose portfolio rules make the struck number almost certainly $1.00 anyway.
Economic mechanism
Forward pricing exists to stop dilution. If a buyer can subscribe at a valuation struck before information arrived, the value they gain comes out of the continuing holders' pockets; the fund is not a counterparty that can lose, it is a pool that gets diluted. Every tokenised fund has to answer who is exposed to the interval between valuations.
There are three answers in production. The fund can refuse to transact except at the next struck figure, which preserves the protection and leaves the token with no intraday primary market. A dealer can transact from its own inventory and hold the interval risk, earning the spread and the financing carry. That is the WisdomTree structure, viable because the underlying is a Rule 2a-7 portfolio whose daily variation is measured in basis points. Or the fund can restrict who may subscribe, which is what most private credit feeders do, using investor eligibility as a substitute for pricing discipline.
The second mechanism is newer: the valuation as a liquidation trigger. Aave's Horizon market takes tokenised Treasury and credit funds as collateral against stablecoin borrowing, with risk parameters set by external risk managers. Once a published valuation determines a loan-to-value ratio, the administrator's number acquires a financial consequence for a party the administrator has no relationship with. The administrator is paid by the fund sponsor and owes duties to shareholders. The loss from a stale, late or wrong figure falls on the protocol's suppliers and on borrowers liquidated against it: the party producing the price does not bear the cost of being wrong, and no contract connects the two.
Where it breaks hardest is private credit. A daily valuation of unlisted loans is an appraisal produced from marks, models and manager judgement. Publishing it every day to eight decimal places, with sixteen node operators attesting that the number was transmitted faithfully, adds precision to transmission and nothing to accuracy.
Participants
Fund administrators and their auditors compute and stand behind the figure. Transfer agents hold the share count that is its denominator. Oracle networks and their node operators transmit it, paid for availability rather than for the correctness of the underlying mark. Dealers and authorised participants intermediate the interval between strikes. Lending protocols and their risk managers consume the figure as a valuation input. Regulators decide whether a transaction may occur at anything other than the next computed value: the SEC through Rule 22c-1 and its exemptive orders, European supervisors through UCITS and alternative fund valuation requirements.
Examples
The WisdomTree order of 23 February 2026 is the first time a US regulator has permitted continuous dealing in a registered fund's tokenised shares at a fixed price rather than at next-computed net asset value, and the relief is written narrowly around government money market funds meeting stated criteria.
WisdomTree's CRDT fund began publishing its valuation onchain in November 2025 at $25.70 as of 4 November, using sixteen independent oracle operators.
Apollo's ACRED has offered redemption at a daily net asset value since January 2025 across six networks, which for private credit is a substantial change from quarterly liquidity, and is the case where the gap between a computed valuation and a realisable price is widest.
Risks and limitations
Stale-value arbitrage is the first-order risk and the oldest one in fund management. It needs no failure of the chain, only a valuation published on a schedule while the market moves continuously. Restricting subscription rights, using a dealer as principal and constraining the portfolio all reduce it. None removes it.
The fixed $1.00 convention deserves more scepticism than it gets. It is defensible for a portfolio subject to Rule 2a-7 and indefensible outside it, and the history of stable-value funds is that the arrangement is safe until a portfolio's shadow price and transaction price diverge under stress. A tokenised wrapper makes the run faster, which is the point the IMF's April 2026 note on tokenised finance makes about stress unfolding with less time to intervene.
Oracle dependency is a concentrated risk that the number of node operators disguises. Sixteen operators transmitting one administrator's figure give redundancy in delivery and none in valuation. A single administrator error propagates to every contract consuming the feed, with no human in the loop.
Practitioners disagree sharply about frequency. Tokenisation platforms argue that daily and eventually intraday valuation improves on assets previously marked quarterly, and that a published number beats none. Fund administrators and auditors counter that valuation frequency should follow the observability of the underlying assets, and that a daily appraisal of illiquid credit invites users to treat it as a price and lend against it. The SEC's route so far, which permits continuous dealing only where the portfolio is constrained enough that the valuation barely moves, implicitly takes the second side.
Key metrics
The figures worth tracking are the audited ones: net asset value per share and total net assets from Form N-CSR or its equivalent, the only valuations an auditor has signed. Three unpublished measures would tell readers most: the spread between the token's traded price and the last struck valuation, the age of the valuation a lending protocol uses, and the difference between token supply on a network and shares recorded on the register. The series carried here are annual by construction; anything more frequent comes from platforms rather than filings and should be labelled as such.
Related research
The SEC order to WisdomTree Digital Trust is worth reading in full, because it shows how narrow the relief from forward pricing is. The Franklin OnChain fund's annual report shows what a blockchain register looks like once an auditor has been over it. Chainlink's material on valuation feeds is a vendor document but states the arbitrage problem accurately, and the IMF's April 2026 note on tokenised finance is the clearest official statement of why automated valuation and automated liquidation together compress the time available to intervene.
The data on this site
The series below are the ones that bear directly on this concept. Each carries its own source, cadence and coverage.
View as table
| Period | Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, net assets | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2022-03-31 | $1,958,000 | First full fiscal year end after the fund commenced operations on 6 April 2021; the financial highlights print net assets of $1,958 thousand. |
| 2023-03-31 | $272,929,000 | |
| 2024-03-31 | $360,554,000 | |
| 2025-03-31 | $687,263,352 | |
| 2026-03-31 | $843,835,815 | Matches the statement of assets and liabilities in the same annual report; the financial highlights round it to $843,836 thousand. |
We hold fewer than two verified observations for this series, so there is no trend to draw. The underlying figures are published by US Securities and Exchange Commission (WisdomTree Digital Trust, Form N-CSR). Cadence: annual, fiscal year ending 30 June. This page will plot them once the history is long enough to mean something.