Net asset value is a fund's total assets minus its liabilities, divided by units outstanding. It is the reference price a tokenized fund gets measured against, struck off chain by the fund's administrator on a schedule the board sets. The token does not create NAV. The assets sitting in the custody account do, and the token reports the number.
NAV is a struck figure with a timestamp, not a live price. Almost everything that goes wrong in a tokenized fund lives in the gap between the moment NAV was struck and the moment somebody traded against it.
Scroll to see the full diagram
The formula is simple. The inputs are the work.
Total assets minus total liabilities, divided by units outstanding. A registered fund computes that figure each business day using the current market value of its holdings, and fair value where no market quotation is readily available.2 Three words in that sentence carry the weight: current, readily, available.
For Treasury bills and gold, quotations are readily available and the fair value question rarely bites. For a private credit book, an appraisal driven property portfolio, or a thinly traded municipal, the administrator is exercising judgement. That judgement is what the holder is actually trusting, and it is exercised by a party the holder never meets. Name who strikes NAV, on what valuation policy, and who reviews it, before anyone opens an editor.
Forward pricing: you get the NAV struck after your order
Rule 22c-1 requires a registered fund to sell, redeem or repurchase its shares at the net asset value next computed after the order arrives, never at a NAV already published.1 The rule exists because a known, stale NAV next to a live market is a free option, and whoever exercises it takes the value out of the remaining holders' pockets.
This is the most transferable rule in the tokenized fund category and the one most often lost in translation. A contract that lets a holder mint or burn against last night's published NAV has rebuilt precisely the arrangement Rule 22c-1 was written to stop. The cutoff time in the offering documents is not administrative housekeeping. It is the mechanism.
NAV is the reference price. It is not the market price.
Three ideas get flattened into one across most RWA documentation, and pulling them apart is the whole exercise. NAV is the reference: what the assets are worth per unit, struck off chain. Creation and redemption arbitrage is the mechanism that drags the traded price toward that reference, by letting eligible participants mint when the token is rich and redeem when it is cheap. The arbitrage band is the residue: the range around NAV the mechanism cannot close, because closing it costs more than the deviation is worth.
So a persistent premium or discount is not a NAV failure. It is a mechanism failure, and the diagnosis runs in that order every time. Is the reference honest. Is the mechanism open to somebody with capital. Is what is left inside the round trip cost of enforcing it.
Constant NAV and accruing NAV behave differently
Two designs, two failure profiles. A constant NAV token targets a fixed unit value and distributes income by issuing additional units, so the holder's balance grows and the quoted value does not. An accruing NAV token holds the unit count fixed and lets per unit value climb.
Superstate's USTB is a live instance of the second. Its net asset value read $11.16 per token against total assets of $757,757,779 on 3 August 2026, on a dashboard that updates continuously.3 Treat that as a point in time reading rather than a constant. The design consequence lands downstream: a constant NAV token drops into payment and collateral plumbing built around a stable unit, an accruing NAV token does not, and every integration that hardcodes a one dollar assumption breaks against it.
Whoever writes NAV onchain is an oracle
The authoritative computation happens off chain. The number reaches the contract through a publisher, and that publisher is an oracle whether anyone labels it one or not. Federal Reserve staff make the same structural point in their work on tokenization: tokenized assets still carry the custody, compliance and operational costs of the traditional market, and the separation between off chain valuation and on chain representation is a property of the architecture rather than a defect to engineer away.4
Three exposures follow, and each needs a written answer. Staleness between strikes, because the token trades around the clock and NAV does not. A privileged writer who can be wrong, coerced or compromised. And an undefined state for what the contract does when the feed stops arriving. In the designs we review, the third is the one missing most often.
What to settle before the first strike
Four decisions. Who computes NAV and against what valuation policy. What time it strikes, and where the order cutoff sits relative to that. Whether the design holds NAV constant or lets it accrue, and what that forces on every downstream integration. And what the contract does when the feed is stale, wrong or silent.
Settle those and the token contract becomes a short piece of work. Skip them and the contract is fine while the tooling around it quietly assumes a number nobody has agreed on. NAV is what the whole structure gets measured against. The token is infrastructure for reporting it, not a source of it, and the return still comes from the assets underneath.
Common questions
How is NAV calculated for a tokenized fund?
The same way it is calculated for any fund: total assets minus total liabilities, divided by units outstanding, using current market values or fair value where no quotation is readily available.2 Tokenization does not change the arithmetic. It changes where the answer gets published and how quickly a holder can act on it, which is why the strike time and the order cutoff matter more in a tokenized structure than in a paper one.
Is NAV the same as the token price?
No. NAV is the reference value of the assets per unit, struck off chain on a schedule. The token price is whatever the secondary market pays. Creation and redemption arbitrage is what pulls the second toward the first, and the gap that remains is the arbitrage band. A persistent gap points at the mechanism or the eligible participant set, not at the valuation.
How often is NAV calculated?
A registered fund strikes NAV each business day at a time its board sets, and orders price at the NAV next computed after they are received.1 Tokenized products inherit that cadence from the fund underneath them. So a token trading continuously against a once daily reference has a stale window every single day, by construction, and the design has to say what happens inside it.
What happens if the NAV feed stops updating?
That depends entirely on what the contract was written to do, and a surprising number do not say. The options are to halt mints and redemptions, fall back to the last good value with a maximum age, or keep operating on a stale number. Only the first two are defensible. Federal Reserve staff treat the split between off chain valuation and onchain representation as structural, so the failure state deserves a written rule.4
See RWA Tokenomics Design for how this applies in practice.
Sources
- 17 CFR 270.22c-1, Pricing of redeemable securities for distribution, redemption and repurchase
Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, current
The forward pricing rule: orders execute at the net asset value next computed after receipt, and NAV is computed at least daily on business days. - Mutual Fund Share Pricing: Frequently Asked Questions
Investment Company Institute, current
Plain language statement of the Rule 2a-4 computation: current market value, fair value where no quotation is readily available, assets less liabilities divided by shares outstanding. - USTB: Superstate Short Duration US Government Securities Fund, asset page
RWA.xyz, 2026
Net asset value of $11.16 per token and total asset value of $757,757,779, read 2026-08-03. A live accruing NAV tokenized fund. Figures update continuously. - Tokenization: Overview and Financial Stability Implications (FEDS Working Paper 2023-060)
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2023
Central bank staff research on tokenized asset architecture, including the persistence of custody and operational costs and the structural separation of off chain valuation from onchain representation.
Last reviewed 2026-08
Know the terms but not sure how they apply to your project? That is what an engagement is for. We design, document, and stress-test the whole token economy inside the Tokenomics Data Room.
100+ projects advised. Complete tokenomics in 4 to 6 weeks.