Net Asset Value (NAV)
The value of a fund's assets minus its liabilities, usually quoted per share; a tokenised fund mints and redeems its shares at this price.
Net asset value (NAV) is what a fund is worth: its assets minus its liabilities. Divided by the number of shares outstanding, it gives the NAV per share, the price at which the fund issues and redeems shares.
A tokenised fund keeps the NAV off chain, where the assets are, and posts it on chain through a feed that someone signs. The token and its vault then mint and redeem at whatever number the feed holds. That makes the NAV feed one of the most sensitive inputs in a real-world asset protocol: if it is stale or wrong, redemptions pay out more or less than the shares are worth, and the holders who stay absorb the difference.
Two checks keep a NAV honest on chain. A staleness check rejects a NAV older than the fund's update cycle allows (see staleness), and a deviation check compares it with an independent reference and pauses redemptions when the two diverge. For two-step redemptions, settling at the next NAV after the request, forward pricing, stops anyone from redeeming at a price they already know is out of date.
Related Terms
Real World Asset (RWA)
Physical or traditional financial assets tokenized on blockchain, such as real estate, bonds, or commodities.
Oracle
A service that provides external data (prices, events, random numbers) to smart contracts that cannot access off-chain information directly.
Staleness
The condition where oracle data or moving average values are outdated and no longer reflect current market conditions.
Forward Pricing
Exchange rate determination at fulfillment time rather than request time, preventing arbitrage from stale NAV data in asynchronous vaults.
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