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A practical RWA security guide
RWAs have momentum, and the momentum has a basis. Tokenization brings capital markets onto rails that support programmability, faster settlement, transparent ownership, and automated cashflow distribution. It also opens distribution, because assets that historically moved through closed networks can be represented, transferred, and managed with consistent rules across participants and venues.
After strong acceleration through 2024 and 2025, RWAs are increasingly discussed as a durable financial layer. Tokenized Treasuries helped set the pattern. Credit and yield structures are extending it. More organizations are evaluating tokenization as a production capability rather than an exploratory product line.
That is why 2026 matters. The category has an opportunity to reshape how capital moves, how collateral is used, how compliance is enforced, and how financial products are issued and serviced.
Security supports this trajectory. It gives investors confidence, it gives builders a clearer target, and it gives compliance and risk owners controls they can explain and evidence.
Why Cantina and Centrifuge wrote this guide together
This guide is a collaboration between Cantina and Centrifuge.
Centrifuge has spent years building RWA infrastructure in production, learning where systems succeed when scale and scrutiny increase. Cantina has supported Centrifuge through multiple security engagements over time, and Centrifuge runs a live bug bounty on Cantina for its V3 stack.
We wrote this as a guide because RWA security is rarely a single-contract story. The critical work sits in the seams: economic logic under stress, data integrity, governance controls, eligibility enforcement where rules exist, and the operational boundary between on-chain execution and off-chain processes.
The goal is to support RWAs as a category by making the security bar legible. Clear expectations reduce friction for builders, investors, and institutions deciding where to deploy capital and credibility.
The RWA security surface in 2026
RWA security is system security. The contracts matter, and the system around the contracts matters just as much.
A mature RWA platform should be able to explain three things in plain language:
- What is guaranteed on-chain.
- What is handled off-chain.
- How off-chain dependencies are controlled, monitored, and evidenced.
From a security lens, RWAs tend to concentrate risk across five layers: contract correctness, data integrity and integration boundaries, governance and admin controls, eligibility and policy enforcement where rules exist, and off-chain processes including custody, servicing, and reporting.
The sections that follow walk through these layers in the same sequence an institutional diligence process tends to encounter them, starting with correctness, then moving outward to the controls that preserve correctness over time.
What changes in 2026
RWAs are moving to production finance.
The security bar rises when the stakes rise. In 2026, the market will not only ask whether contracts were reviewed. It will ask whether the entire system is defensible under scrutiny and resilient under stress. That includes how changes are controlled, how data is produced and validated, how eligibility rules are enforced where they exist, and how off-chain dependencies are governed.
In practical terms, this is a shift from security as an event to security as an operating model.
Contract correctness is financial correctness
In RWAs, smart contract security is not only about preventing an exploit that drains funds. It is also about ensuring that the economic promises of the product are implemented correctly.
That distinction matters because many RWA failure modes are “quiet.” They do not look like an attack. They look like a system that behaves differently than stakeholders were led to expect: redemptions that don’t match the rules, waterfalls that distribute incorrectly, fees that compound in edge cases, or permissions that allow an action the organization didn’t realize was possible.
The highest-value work in RWA contract security tends to focus on:
- Accounting integrity: shares, interest accrual, fee computation, and redemption logic must remain consistent over time and under stress. If the accounting can drift, it creates outcomes that are hard to unwind.
- Edge-state behavior: paused states, delayed data updates, partial settlements, and default paths are not exceptional scenarios in RWAs. They are expected. Those paths deserve the same design attention as the happy path.
- Permissioning accuracy: RWAs frequently include roles and restrictions. Bugs or overly broad privileges in these paths are often higher risk than an isolated coding issue, because they can change investor outcomes system-wide.
- Integration boundaries: oracles, adapters, custody modules, and cross-system messaging often become the real risk concentration. Correctness at the boundary matters as much as correctness inside the core.
Continuous security is becoming the baseline
A point-in-time security review is a snapshot. RWAs are long-lived systems with evolving dependencies.
Over time, integrations expand, markets stress the system in new ways, and attacker tooling improves. A credible security posture in 2026 assumes that unknown unknowns exist, and pays to surface them before adversaries do.
That is why bug bounties matter so much for RWAs. When structured well, they keep production systems under pressure-testing, extend scrutiny beyond a single engagement window, and convert potential exploitation into responsible disclosure.
The difference between a serious bounty program and a decorative one is operational maturity. Scope clarity, severity-based rewards that match the financial risk, a credible triage and response process, and disciplined patch deployment all determine whether the program produces real security outcomes.
Centrifuge’s approach is intentionally visible. Its Centrifuge V3 bug bounty on Cantina is live with a maximum reward of $250,000 in USDC, and it has been running since July 17, 2025. That is a strong signal to both institutions and researchers: security is treated as continuous, and it is resourced accordingly.
Governance and admin controls are not optional in RWAs
In RWAs, governance is a security layer.
The fastest way to turn an otherwise well-reviewed protocol into institutional risk is to leave change power unconstrained. RWAs often require privileged actions for legitimate reasons: eligibility configuration, parameter tuning, oracle selection, emergency pausing, and sometimes upgrades. Those same privileges are also a common source of catastrophic outcomes when keys are compromised, changes are rushed, or controls are weaker than stakeholders assumed.
The question institutions will ask is not whether an organization is trustworthy. The question is whether the system reduces the consequences of mistakes and compromise.
This is where straightforward controls carry disproportionate weight:
- Multi-party authorization: privileged actions should not be executable by a single key or a single person’s device.
- Meaningful delay for high-impact actions: systems that introduce observability windows make it harder to execute harmful changes quickly and quietly, and they give monitoring and stakeholders time to respond.
- Separation of duties: the role that can pause should not automatically be the role that can upgrade. The role that can change eligibility should not automatically be able to route value. Blast radius matters.
- Release and change discipline: secure systems do not only have secure code. They have controlled change processes that minimize accidental failure and make changes auditable.
The best part of Web3 is that many of these controls can be encoded directly into the system, making them observable and verifiable rather than policy-dependent.
Compliance-by-design, where rules exist
RWAs frequently operate with eligibility constraints, jurisdiction rules, or transfer restrictions. Whether these rules are legal requirements or product design choices, the security implication is the same: if a rule exists, it must be enforceable.
Relying on a frontend or an off-chain workflow to enforce eligibility is not a defensible security boundary. Frontends can be bypassed. Off-chain processes can fail silently. Settlement paths need to respect the rules the product claims to enforce.
This does not require that every RWA be permissioned. It requires that restrictions, when present, are testable and reliably enforced. It also requires evidence. Compliance and risk owners do not want narrative assurance. They want artifacts: observable enforcement, change history, and an audit trail that explains what happened and why.
In 2026, protocols that make controls verifiable rather than aspirational will be easier to underwrite, integrate, and distribute.
Off-chain integrity is part of the security model
RWAs are hybrid systems. The off-chain components are part of the attack surface.
Custodians, SPVs, originators, servicers, reporting pipelines, and legal enforcement paths are all control points. If reporting can be altered without detection, the system’s economic truth can be manipulated without touching the smart contracts. If custody procedures fail under operational disruption, backing becomes uncertain. If legal structure does not match the token’s implied claims, there is no on-chain remedy.
This is where mature RWA design becomes explicit about trust boundaries and failure tolerance:
How NAV and cashflow reporting is produced, validated, and monitored.
What happens if data updates are delayed, disputed, or unavailable.
What happens under default and recovery, including who has authority, how decisions are logged, and how stakeholders are informed.
How counterparties and service providers are governed, and what resilience plans exist when one fails.
The market does not require that every dependency be eliminated. It requires that dependencies are understood, controlled, and evidenced.
What our collaboration with Centrifuge demonstrates
Centrifuge’s footprint on Cantina shows a security program built over time, not a single milestone. Across the profile, Centrifuge has a total reward pool of $375,000 listed on Cantina, including a live bug bounty for Centrifuge V3 with a maximum $250,000 reward, plus prior security work that includes a $125,000 competition and multiple completed collaborative reviews in 2025 across key components.
The point is not the number. The point is the pattern: repeated review coverage aligned to real releases, paired with continuous incentives for production scrutiny.
That is the direction the category is moving in 2026. As RWAs compete for institutional trust, security programs and operational controls will matter more than isolated credentials.
Closing: the standard is rising
RWAs will scale when systems are defensible under scrutiny.
In 2026, “secure” increasingly means correct contract behavior under stress, constrained change risk, continuous assurance in production, verifiable policy enforcement where rules exist, and explicit trust boundaries for off-chain dependencies.
Contact us to match your organization with a high-touch, modular security model.